


That Lucky Old Sun

by SkilledWarriorKiwi



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amputation, And it messes him up enough he doesn't rapidly age like Dave, Angst, Awkward Family Reunions, Bad Jokes, Bleeding Effect, Blood and Violence, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Brotherly Love, Cannibalism, Cannibalistic Thoughts, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Childhood Trauma, Continuity What Continuity, Epic Friendship, Fix-It of Sorts, Gekko abuse, Hallucinations, Hey if Kojima can completely mess up how genes work then so can I, Identity Issues, Infant Death, Isolation, Liquid Is Temporarily Domesticated, Liquid is killed from FOXDIE but only temporarily, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Mantis basically fully highjacks Screaming's body in this, Mental Instability, Mental Link, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Mind Control, Mind Meld, Misgendering, Misunderstandings, Muse Made Me Do It, Nanomachines, Nomad, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Past Mind Control, Psychic Bond, Self-Indulgent, Sentimental Murderers, Sharing a Body, Snakes on a Plane, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vomiting, for me anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-07-15 06:14:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7211174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkilledWarriorKiwi/pseuds/SkilledWarriorKiwi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the years following Liquid's temporary death on Shadow Moses he completely fell off the map. He now fully understood why his twin chose to isolate himself after Zanzibarland; there was something immensely appealing about wallowing in misery and PTSD, alone in the countryside and unbothered by the rest of humanity as life marched on. Of course, Liquid was missing an arm and the only person he cared about but he was alive and that was enough for his bruised and battered pride.</p>
<p>Then the Guns of the Patriots Incident occurs and while Liquid can tolerate a lot of things like dying, having parts of his body thieved from him by a turncoat and suffering from foreign invasive memories he couldn't understand the source of, seeing that traitorous old fool Ocelot steal his name and besmirch the memory of his long-dead companion Psycho Mantis was going completely over the line.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wake

_FOX?_

_DIE._

* * *

Snow drifted down slowly upon the islands within Alaska's Fox Archipelago within the Bering Sea, which was followed by a steady icy wind. It was typical weather for the small group of islands and at this point of the season everything had been coated in a thickening layer of snow. The island of Shadow Moses was no exception with the once busy nuclear weapons disposal facility now standing silent and empty as all living personnel having either fled or were currently lying dead within the cold steel walls. 

The only creatures remaining alive on the desolate island were a few solitary wolves and softly cawing ravens. But half a mile from the facility there was a single man lying on the outskirts of the base, slowly clawing up into consciousness from where he was lying prone and bloodied next to the torn remains of a overturned jeep.

Liquid felt nothing at first, just a yawning emptiness in body and mind. Everything felt distant and muffled as if he was wrapped up in thick cotton wool. It took far too long before he could even open his eyes with accompanying pinpricks of pain, eyelashes clumped together from snowflakes and ice while the rest of his body even less responsive.

When he finally succeeded the first thing he saw were the auroras twisting like blue and green ribbons far above him. Through their transparent and shimmering forms he could see the broad swathe of stars but that was lost among the knee-jerk vertigo his sight brought on and his stomach lurched unhappily as the taste of bile grew thick within his mouth.

For long minutes Liquid just lay there breathing slowly, thoughts moving at a sluggish and uncooperative pace as the cold had settled bone-deep within him. Despite the snow steadily gathering on his bare chest and face Liquid felt nothing and his limbs weren't shivering from the low temperature but he knew from his past experiences that feeling numb in such cold was even worse than feeling the ice. It mean hypothermia was steadily taking hold as it shifted from mild to severe, which meant he either had to move or die.

Liquid was many things but one of his most blatantly obvious traits was his immovable pride; it was only that ego that forced him to move. With shaky, clumsy movements he attempted to sit up, going to lean his weight back on his elbows as he gingerly shifted only to fall heavily on his back with a wheezing gasp. There was something wrong, something terribly wrong that was now nagging excessively at him which his sluggish mind had difficulty figuring out in his partially frozen state. Breath shaky and shallow Liquid shifted his gaze, eyeing his left arm and hand which was coated in snowflakes. Experimentally he tried to move his fingers and after a few long moments of no response he finally saw them twitch before slowly managing to curl his gloved hand into a fist. Satisfied with that he moved his attention to his right arm only to pause, the sense of foreboding now overwhelming.

It took him a few confused moments to comprehend what he was seeing and when he did a strangled moan escaped him; his right arm below the elbow was completely missing. Instead his arm just ended in a bloodied stump, a small pool of frozen blood gathered on the snow underneath, painting the white a deep rustic scarlet. The wound was surprisingly neat, with the edges of the amputation cut by a sharp knife used by someone who intimately knew the human body.

 _Ocelot..._ even as Liquid thought that the suspicion rang true; there was no one else missing a right hand on Shadow Moses and obviously the cowardly bastard chose to butcher him while he was half dead in the tundra, thieving his arm and rabbiting for God knows where after all the plans collapsed in a fiery heap. _Why_ Ocelot stole his arm was another question, one Liquid wasn't sure he wanted to know the reasoning behind. Replacing damaged body parts with prosthetic limbs was quite common place and Ocelot only lost a hand rather than an entire arm so it was disturbing, if anything, that the old man chose to thieve Liquid's organic limb for replace his own severed hand.

With a near inaudible groan Liquid managed to carefully shift himself until he was sitting upright on the snow, his remaining hand lightly pressing against the skin above his mutilated opposite. Only the sheer cold of the outside of Shadow Moses had stopped him from bleeding to death on the snow but Liquid knew if he stayed outside in his current state he'd develop severe hypothermia and freeze to death in the barren tundra.

It was more automatic with him very slowly getting to his feet, body numb and unwilling at first to respond. His walk back to Shadow Moses's base was sluggish and half blind from the consistent snowfall but it had ebbed from its near blizzard like state it had turned into during the transition of dusk, which was a blessing or he never would've gotten back.

Truthfully Liquid wasn't even sure how he managed to get back inside Shadow Moses without collapsing; he just remembered the drunken stumbling towards the base, movements disjointed and vision blurred, a brief stumble through the hanger bays, down several blood splattered corridors, stumbling down a flight of stairs and then he was lying face down on the white tiled floor inside the medical bay, mouth dry and body shaking violently.

For several long moments he remained sprawled on the ground, surrounded by the sterile smell and silence of the abandoned base before he moved until he was sitting on the floor, breath coming in tight pants. A small part of his mind noticed his spasmodic shivering with satisfaction, as the absence of it was more worrying and the introduction of the warmth inside Shadow Moses was slowly creeping back into his freezing body. 

The sheer cold outside had been a mixed blessing, lowering his core body temperature enough the exposed arteries in his arm only spilled out blood in a slow, sluggish pace rather than letting him bleed to death within minutes. It also left him immensely numb to all sensations, so he started to work on fixing up his wound while he felt no pain even as his right hand and his face began to sting as the feeling began to gradually crawl back due to the warmer heat within the interior of Shadow Moses. The numbness would be a blessing in disguise for his first aid as well, as he wouldn't need to bother drugging himself to control the pain.

With a groan he dragged himself along the cool tiles on his remaining hand until he was against the medical cabinet and slowly managed to calm his breathing down somewhat before he groped around until he found the handle to the cabinet and promptly ripped off the door with a spasmodic heave and tossed it across the room. The suturing kit was the closest so he grabbed that, knowing he needed to close the open arteries before his body temperature stabilized which would cause him to bleed to death rapidly and even by then the blood coming from his arm had turned into steady dripping. Deciding to use the gauze inside as a temporary tourniquet around the stump of his right arm, he carefully wrapped the material three inches from the beginning of the amputation. Liquid nearly fell unconscious again as his vision blurred but he gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay awake as he focused his attention onto the exposed arteries. 

Inside the kit was the typical forceps, needle, scissors and scalpel but it was the long, strong thread he was after. His woozy vision meant it took him nearly a minute to carefully unspool the thread and after a few frustrated attempts he tore off his remaining glove to get a better grip. Muttering an internal thanks for his ambidexterity he began the slow process of tying off the arteries, starting with the brachial one. There was some luck in the location of where his stolen limb had been severed at; he still had his upper arm and Liquid had to grudgingly admit that Ocelot had done a very clean job of extracting his radius and ulna bone with surgical perfection and leaving his elbow and humerus bones completely intact.

Still didn't mean he was happy about the limb theft in the slightest, though.

Finally he finished tying up the last artery- _the ulna,_ he thought -and he slumped against the medical cabinet, breathing heavily. Pins and needles had started to swarm through his body unpleasantly as the sensation returned and with it was coming the slowly growing pain. The most obvious came from his bloodied stump and the bone-deep ache in his chest from his supposed heart attack but there were all the minor wounds he'd suffered leading up to it, from his vicious fist fight with his brother on top of the REX then falling off the mechanical beast.

Pushing that aside Liquid forced himself upright, vision blurry and nearly fainting before he caught his bearings and stumbled over to the sink. There he began to methodically clean his bloodied amputation with water, washing away the dirt and grime that had gathered up inside the wound while in his unconscious state and drunken stagger back to base. Once the water stopped being a dirty red and became a light pink he was satisfied it was clean enough and settled back in front of the cabinet, briefly blacking out for several minutes. When he came to he was slumped against the wood, brow pressed against the frame of the remaining door and slick with icy sweat. Groaning he tried to grip the top of the cabinet, momentarily forgetting he was missing an arm and making him bang his forehead against the wood and curse heavily.

Without caring too much he groped inside the cabinet until he found the first thing labeled 'anti-bacterial' and started slathering the foul smelling concoction on his stump, baring his teeth and giving a low growl as pain began to steadily spike up his arm. Carefully he loosened the tourniquet and grabbed more of the gauze and dressed the stump, covering the wound thickly and keeping the white material curled tight and secure until it crawled up around his shoulder.

 _That should do._ Or at least stop him from bleeding out until he got off Shadow Moses. He wasn't sure when the government was going to firebomb the place or came raiding the base to gather information about REX. He'd deal with whatever happens when it did.

With a huff he stood up but the sudden movement caused all the blood to suddenly rush to his head and making everything to spin violently. He stumbled to the side, nearly tripping over a stool and managing to fall on the medical bed on his uninjured side. With a grunt he quickly rolled off it, hitting the tiled floor with a harsh noise but the sudden burst of pain on his skull knocked aside the sudden influx of exhaustion from his blood loss.

It took long- too long, in his opinion -for him to get back on his feet, feeling so unbelievably weak. He hadn't felt so weak since he'd been captured and tortured by the Iraqis and even then he'd gotten out of the incident with all his limbs intact, if not missing some mental coherency. Liquid gave a quick glance at his missing limb and knew that after fixing that severe injury he knew he needed to replenish his blood; the most obvious and quick way would be a blood transfer but the facilities on Shadow Moses weren't equipped for such a thing. So he'd had to do it through the longer method of just finding food that contained what his body sorely needed.

However before Liquid left the medical bay he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror next to the doorway and he paused, eyeing his reflection dubiously; he looked awful, with deep circles ringing his eyes which were so heavily bloodshot it was difficult to see any of the white sclera. Dirt, snow and blood were caked in his tangled blond hair with more blood splattered across his bruised face. His bare chest was covered in more filth and numerous scratches and cuts. However the most obvious wound- besides his amputated arm -was the massive bruise which had spread across his sternum, colouring the bronzed flesh an ugly deep purple.

The colour of the bruise concerned him slightly. Usually they would only become purple or blue after a day at least and Liquid was still unsure how long he spent outside in the tundra. But then again due to being a genetically augmented clone he'd always healed more rapidly than any normal-bred human was capable of. Going by that logic he may have only been in the snow for hours- four or six. He didn't have a solid idea beyond speculations at the current point and his head ached too much for him to dwell upon it.

Raising his remaining hand he carefully traced the large splotchy bruise lying just underneath his skin. As soon as he put any kind of pressure on it he grunted as pain radiated through his chest and made his vision swim. It was a bone-deep agony and in that moment Liquid was completely certain he had, in fact, been successfully killed by FOXDIE. If only temporarily which was bemusing. He still felt so weak and shaky, now he guessed it was from blood loss and the ineffectiveness of his recovering heart to fully circulate his blood around his body due to the attack it had suffered. With a slow exhale Liquid moved his hand up his chest, brushing against his dog tags before resting the tips of his fingers against the underside of his throat, the calloused pads resting lightly against his jugular. His heartbeat was weak, almost irregular, but he was most certainly not dead.

With a grunt Liquid stumbled away from the mirror, bloodied lips thinning into a frown. He was still unsure how FOXDIE triggered the artificial heart attack beyond it targeting certain genetic sequences and using Solid Snake as a living carrier but whatever it had done to him clearly hadn't been enough. Usually he would've felt smug pride in knowing even a lab cooked plague hadn't been enough to kill him off but now all Liquid felt was tired and empty.

And alone.

Thinking on that just invited misery so he irritably shoved it aside in a brief flare of anger and left the medical bay. His body was starved and he wasn't about to deny it in his current state, even as incoherent and weak as he was.

Luckily the kitchens of Shadow Moses was well stocked with food- mostly from the previous military command that controlled the building before the coup -but Liquid had noticed the genome soldiers seemed strangely susceptible to the cold as a byproduct of their weak and rapidly unstable genetics. Because of this the genome soldiers tended to require more vitamins and minerals to perform correctly as their bodies would deteriorate far quicker than a normal humans. It was a frustrating weakness he'd hoped to resolve via Big Boss's body and genetic sequence but that plan met an absolute failure.

As it was the cafeteria was utterly deserted like the rest of the base and Liquid eyed the vacant area upon arrival, noting the abandoned food on the tables and upturned chairs as if the genome soldiers had left in a great hurry. Probably, considering those cowardly defective vermin only obeyed him because Mantis kept a psychic hold upon their minds and when he died they instantly fled like rats escaping a sinking ship.

At the thought of his oldest and only friend bile rose into his throat and his heat throbbed. With a strangled gasp he leaned against the door way, eyes squeezed shut against the vertigo and eerie silence that lurched up within him. It took almost a minute to regain control of himself and he ignored the sudden wetness on his cheeks as he crossed the cafeteria and stumbled into the kitchen. As soon as he was through the doors his nostrils were filled with the smell of food and nausea lurched violently within him once again. This time he did throw up, luckily managing to do so inside one of the sinks.

The action caused his chest pain to nearly cripple him and he threw up again from the agonizing sensation. After a few more heaves, he stopped before spitting despondently. The reek of bile made him wrinkle his nose up in distaste but instead he just turned the taps on and methodically cleaned up the sink. He'd thrown up before so it wasn't really anything new to him. The sharp, aching pain radiating through his breastbone was new however and it took him a few minutes of wheezing softly and leaning against the sink before he finally managed to move again. First he rinsed his mouth out with water from the still running tap, washing out the lingering taste of bile and spitting the water out.

Awkwardly pushing himself one handed away from the sink his breath hitched from the deep pain pulsing through his chest even as he shifted his attention back to his current task. Liquid needed something to replenish his blood, which meant he needed food that contained iron, vitamin C and protein. He also probably needed chlorophyll and potassium but he was moreso focused on the first three. A ransack of the fridges and pantries finally got him what he needed- liver, red bell peppers and fish.

Suddenly ravenous he ate the liver raw, not bothering to cook it. Blood seeped out of the fleshy, burgundy-coloured organ as he bit off chunks of it, running down his hand and dripping onto the tiled floor below. Raw liver wasn't especially tasty but the blood and texture was familiar and within moments he'd eaten the entire thing. The bell peppers met the same fate, their taste mingling terribly with the offal he'd consumed moments before but Liquid didn't care. He'd eaten worse. The fish he ate last and he was reasonably sure it was some kind of salmon. He wasn't certain. Regardless, it had the protein his wounded body sorely needed and within moments it was gone as well.

His stomach, previously complaining about being empty, was now gurgling unpleasantly from overindulgence and the previous vomit session. He ignored it, instead carefully checking over his injured arm again as he waited for his stomach to settle. After Liquid did so he glanced around the kitchen before his eyes fell on something sitting up on one of the upper counters; a bag of fresh shredded meat. It had defrosted outside of the freezer and blood was pooled underneath it from the warmer inner climate of Shadow Moses. That off-cut mixed meat was only used by the one female member of FOXHOUND, for her beloved pets.

Suddenly curious Liquid walked out of the cafeteria, foot steps echoing loudly through the deserted corridors. He wasn't sure precisely what led him towards the boiler room but eventually he found himself standing in the wide doorway of the facility, the gently falling snowflakes stark against the inky blackness of the night sky. The snowfield was scattered with large trees and small hills but what snagged his attention were the soft, echoing cries of wolves; Wolf's animals, of that he had no doubt. Curious he stepped forward, shivering slightly as the air rapidly cooled as soon as he exited the interior and entered the field. It took some searching but he followed the noises of the animals until he eventually located them sitting together out in edge the field.

Wolf's dogs were grouped around a familiar figure clothed white lying motionless in the snow. While the beasts softly whined at his slow approach they didn't stop him, instead staying in a circle crying lowly over their dead mistress. Sniper Wolf herself looked almost ethereal in death with her already pale skin gaining the ivory tint of the grave, long hair spread around around her like a sickly halo on the bloody snow she was lying upon. A matching stain marred her green painted lips.

The deepest mark on her however, was the crimson soaking her side and changing her white uniform shirt a muddy red. A well placed bullet from Liquid's brother, no doubt. He had a feeling the rifle she was embracing to her chest even within death also came from him.

A thin layer of snow had already built up on Wolf's prone form, as it had also done upon the pelts of her loyal dogs from where they sat besides her. Liquid had no idea how much time had passed since she had died out here. Or had the FOXDIE indued heart attack; he wasn't sure if she was susceptible to the lab bred weapon or if Solid managed to kill her first before the artificial plague kicked in. She was, after all, a sniper so Liquid wasn't sure if it affected her at such a long distance or even what the time range was between being exposed and dying. Or she even could've been seriously injured by the wound on her side which incapacitated her long enough that Solid killed her by proxy. 

Liquid stared aimlessly at Wolf's corpse, completely unaware of the stretching lapse of time until the warm tongue of one of the dogs licked at his remaining hand. The sudden juxtaposition of the warmth of the dog's tongue with his freezing fingers caused him to give a small noise of surprise, shaking off the encroaching urge to sleep and grogginess as he shot the animal an irritated look. Staying out in the cold in his current wounded state clearly wasn't doing him any favours, even with his slapdash medical aid, and it would slowly undo the good the warmth of the inside Shadow Moses and his previous eating session did for him, especially considering he still hadn't bother to put on a coat.

With a soft exhale Liquid reluctantly turned away from Wolf's body, unsure of what he felt. He never considered Wolf a friend; she was an acquaintance at most, with most of their interactions based on business or within FOXHOUND. She was a calm and collected woman with an elegant grace to her demeanor and he respected her. Still, there was something immensely disquiet about seeing her corpse. Liquid wasn't sure why since he'd seen hundreds, thousands even, of bodies over his years of living but it could just be the serene, almost peaceful, way Wolf was lying dead in the snow surrounded by her loyal hounds. As if she'd found some kind of peace in dying. It wasn't something he wanted to dwell on; not in his current compromised state.

He made his way back into the slight warmth of Shadow Moses, his feet leading him to another familiar part of the silent base until he found himself standing in front of a shut doorway at the end of an elaborate hallway. He paused in front of the shut doors with his hand extended, stomach churning uncomfortably as he knew exactly what, and _who,_ he'd find on the other side. After several stagnant minutes he finally moved, opening the doors with a creak of hinges and entering the room.

Immediately a faintly burnt smell curled up into his nostrils but other than that the atmosphere was suspiciously empty. The room had been wrecked quite thoroughly with the shattered remain of a vase lying on the ground near the door, several broken chairs scattered about and a desk which had been snapped in half. Dozens of books had been hurled around the room and some of the bookcases had massive dents in them. The portraits on the wall looked as if they'd been set on fire, the pictures charred and the busts that dotted the room likewise lay in ruins. Bullet holes were everywhere, in the walls, the floors, even a few in the roof while the spent shells littered the plush carpet. 

However the most obvious thing which snagged his attention was the leather clad form of Psycho Mantis, lying prone on the floor off to the side.

For a while Liquid just stared at him, breath uneven and body twitching sporadically before he approached the downed psychic and carefully knelt down by his side. Mantis's bony chest was riddled with bullet holes with the blood stains near indistinguishable against the black leather, while more blood had soaked into the thick carpet beneath him.

It was a completely inane, childish hope that caused Liquid to reach out with his left hand and fit his bare fingers against the underside of Mantis's mask, touching the cold skin and feeling the utter absence of a pulse. Of course there was nothing; the psychic was dead. He pulled his hand away slightly before running it down Mantis's throat, along his collar, across to his bare shoulder and then down one slender arm until Liquid reached the psychic's wrist. Gently he linked his fingers through Mantis's longer ones and carefully pulled the Russian's arm up slightly; it was stiff as rigor mortis had already settled deeply into Mantis's lanky body. He'd been dead hours.

Liquid already knew that. He knew as soon as Mantis had been killed. He'd felt something _wrench_ violently within him and then suddenly Mantis was gone, their mental link abruptly becoming inert. The link was something they'd had for decades, ever since they melded minds for the first time through Sahelanthropus all those years ago when they were children. A part of his mind that belonged to Mantis and vice versa which they'd held onto, even after separating as young adults and reuniting later in life. A part which had remained connected to Mantis, that had always shifted and flowed with the psychic's thoughts and feelings no matter how long they'd been apart for. Something that had allowed them to communicated with their minds far more easily then any spoken word. An intrinsic part of himself that had died along with Mantis.

Now Liquid was alone, every part of him feeling cold and empty. Hollow.

A soft noise broke the silence within the room and Liquid belatedly realized he was now hunched over Mantis, the psychic's limp hand pressed against his jaw as tears rolled silently down his cheeks before falling and lightly impacting on Mantis's chest. A part of him expected Mantis to shove him away and call him a sentimental fool, something the psychic had done before and quite often whenever Liquid violated his personal space. But he was dead and Liquid was alone.

Grief wasn't something Liquid had felt before- usually it was supplanted by fury or disdain or spite but now he felt a hideous clenching within his stomach and his vision was blurred with tears as he was suddenly crippled by the emotion, making him let out a low keening noise as he bent over with Mantis's hand still pressed firmly against his jaw.

Mantis hadn't cared about Liquid's plan whatsoever but he'd come to his aid the instant Liquid asked him even if he outright said the soldier's plans were stupid. But even then he'd know that Mantis had wanted to die; Liquid had know that the instant they'd reunited together in FOXHOUND, feeling the strange, inexorable yearning for death dwelling deep within the psychic. They never really spoke of their previous experiences, Liquid being a POW and Mantis's psychotic breakdown with the FBI but due to their link it was something they didn't bother hiding from one another either. However Liquid didn't know how to deal with Mantis's sudden wish for death and just never chose to open the conversation. He'd known that Mantis's pride would never allow him to take his own life but apparently Mantis chose to find a loophole via Solid Snake.

Dying to a legendary soldier would've been a compromise Mantis's ego would've accepted and obviously did.

By this point Liquid had leaned over until his forehead was resting against Mantis's bony sternum, the tip of his nose brushing against one of the bullet holes and the scent of blood and leather drowning out everything else. His tears still fell silently, mixing with the blood and causing it to run slightly, but alongside his grief Liquid felt rage; rage at knowing Mantis chose to abandon him and leave, choosing death over staying with him.

Intellectually he knew many things were involved in Mantis's death, be it the psychic's suicidal mind or the fact he'd been stretching his abilities far beyond their normal parameters. If Liquid had managed to truly acquire the genome soldiers loyalty then Mantis might not have been forced to control all the artificial soldiers with his psychics and thus severely weaken him for his battle with Solid. But as it was Mantis who was forced to juggle subjugating the genome soldiers, fully controlling that Silverburgh woman and keeping that wayward cyborg ninja under his thumb while simultaneously fighting someone whose abilities were on par with Liquid's own. 

Little wonder Mantis died, with all those circumstances piling up on him. 

It still didn't mean Liquid was going to forgive him in a hurry. Mantis was the only person Liquid truly trusted in his miserable life but now Mantis was dead and Liquid was alone with the repercussions for his actions. A fitting punishment, all things considered, and Liquid was now sure that was the only reason he'd been spared by FOXDIE.

But spite and pride would still motivate him so after several more minutes of weeping silently over the corpse of the only human Liquid ever considered his friend he reluctantly pulled himself away. The ache in his chest was throbbing with a vengeance from being bent over for so long and the pain from his mutilated arm was getting far too vibrant but Liquid ignored them both, instead releasing Mantis's stiff hand and carefully touching the muzzle of the psychic's gas mask. Through the orange tinted lenses Liquid could see Mantis's shut eyes and he stared at them for a brief moment before looking away.

He may not currently be in the mood to forgive his friend but he wasn't going to leave Shadow Moses without taking care of Mantis's body.

Liquid was more and more unconvinced that the government was still planning to carpet bomb the island considering the length of time that had passed, so Liquid would guess they revoked that decision. However having squads dispatched to strip the facility wasn't a farfetched idea and Liquid had little doubt they'd steal Mantis's corpse and cart it off to some lab and dissect it like a frog in a science class. That was one indignity Liquid wouldn't permit to be inflicted upon the psychic- not again. 

Mind resolved Liquid awkwardly picked Mantis up. It was an annoying task, with Mantis being taller than him and Liquid missing an arm but eventually he managed to sling the psychic across his left shoulder. Mantis's bony chest dug into his skin and his mask knocked against Liquid's back as soldier walked from the room, carefully keeping a hand on Mantis's hip to keep him from falling off. Eventually Liquid found himself back before the snowfield, where Wolf lay out in the cold and Liquid eyed the snowy plain and thick trees from his position in the doorway before he gingerly sat Mantis down.

It took the better half of an hour before Liquid collected enough wood to make a satisfactory pyre, going back inside Shadow Mose's and breaking anything made of wood he could find. Numerous chairs, tables and cabinets were torn apart and stacked together a few yards into the snowfield. By the time he was finished his skin was slick with sweat and his chest ached but the task had the benefit of shaking off the lingering affects of his hypothermia even if he knew it'd been some time before he was fully recovered. While brushing off his brow Liquid caught the mourning howl of a wolf and for a second Liquid considered creating a pyre for Sniper Wolf as well but just as quickly dismissed the idea; she'd been at home in the snowy tundra, instantly fitting to the new environment with startling ease. Even in death the snow seemed to embrace her and it felt strangely disrespectful for Liquid to tarnish that. Mantis was a creature of fire, had always been even as a child. Fire had burned its mark deep within his flesh and it seemed fitting Liquid would finally destroy his body with it.

For a moment Liquid lingered before returning to the doorway and picking Mantis back up, grunting slightly at the burning in his muscles and Liquid knew he was nearly done in terms of energy. Despite that, he'd finish the task at hand so with careful movements he placed Mantis on top of the wood, getting a splinter in his thumb while doing so. Liquid irritably sucked it out and spat it off to the side before eyeing the psychic's corpse from where it lay. The snow matched the sickly tone of Mantis's exposed skin while his black leather stood out stark. Again a film of tears blurred his vision and Liquid irritably blinked them away before going back inside. Finding gasoline was easy enough but a lighter was oddly scarce. Liquid didn't smoke and neither did any of FOXHOUND so he had to go frisk the corpses of the genome soldiers in the blood splattered hallway until he found a box of matches in one of their pockets.

When he was back at the snowfield he doused the wood in gasoline, nose wrinkling at the smell. As he went to light the pyre he paused, eyeing Mantis who was lying almost peacefully upon it. After struggling internally for a few moments Liquid eventually moved, shoving the matches back into his pant pocket before shifting around to Mantis's head. Then he carefully began to undo the straps on Mantis's gas mask, the task seemingly taking minutes due to Liquid struggling with one hand.

When he finally set the mask off to one side the ache within his gut churned up again violently when he revealed his friend's face, the scarred and burnt featured as familiar as his own. Ever since Liquid had been a child and saw it for the first time he'd found Mantis's ruined face strangely appealing and in death the constant tenseness within the psychic's features had smoothed out. His eyes were shut, long dark lashes stark against his pale skin and his lips were slack, rather than being twisted up into its usual sneer or scowl.

Liquid stared at Mantis's face for nearly a minute before he leaned over and very gently kissed him, pressing his lips against Mantis's scarred ones. He kept his lips pressed against the psychic's for a long moment before pulling back. As he did his dog tags snagged on a jagged end of wood, making the metal click together. At the sound he froze before coming to another decision and pulling off his dog tags and placing them on Mantis's chest. A final memento, if it could be called that. He was about to back up before remembering to pick up Mantis's mask again; the man, if he'd been alive, would've given Liquid an earful over removing it in the first place so Liquid diligently fixed it back around his bald head, pulling the straps tight and secure. When he was finished he backed away a few meters before digging out the matches from his pocket.

With an almost careless flick he lit the match, tossed it at the pyre and with a faint _woosh_ fire eagerly leapt up onto the gasoline-soaked wood. Liquid watched dispassionately as the flames engulfed the pyre and Mantis. The smell of burning leather and flesh filled his nostrils and Liquid got the brief urge of hunger before going back to watching the twisting flames as it consumed his friend. He stood guard as the fire steadily ate away the wood and body, ignoring his body shivering as snowflakes tried to settle upon him only to melt from the heat.

A small part of Liquid wanted to crawl up besides Mantis on the pyre and burn along with him and before he was fully aware he'd noticed he'd taken two steps forward until the intense flames were near blistering. With a sharp inhale he backed up, blaming the streaks of wetness on his cheeks as his eyes watering from the sudden intense heat. Still, after that he ignored everything as he waited patiently for the flames to gut themselves. 

From Liquid's past experience with impromptu cremations he knew they could take hours, sometimes even up to five or seven, but it seemed barely half an hour before Mantis's body was consumed and turned into ash, the ground beneath now melted free of snow and the only thing left in the pyre's place was some burnt sticks of wood and a severely warped gas mask. He was unsure why the fire seemed to embrace Mantis so eagerly but for all he knew the element recognized one of its own practitioners and eagerly embraced him. The chain of thought disturbed him so after eyeing the mask lying in the burnt ground he finally chose to leave.

Liquid intended to escape Shadow Moses using one of the many boats left in reserve but instead of going to the docks he found himself back in Mantis's office. Liquid opened the other doorway behind another bookcase, unlocking the door to Mantis's private room on the opposite side, only a few feet from where his corpse had laid. 

The room was spartan and bare, the psychic having no use for items of sentiment or materialism. The bed was made, the desk empty and the wardrobe vacant. The only thing in the room that seemed personalized was the FOXHOUND jacket that had been carefully folded up and placed on the end of Mantis's bed. A feeling Liquid refused to name caused him to pick up Mantis's discarded coat and shrug it on, movements awkward to compensate for his missing right forearm. The numerous belts of leather Mantis had always insisted on wearing around his sleeves flopped around like lifeless snakes as Liquid buttoned up the coat, his shivering bare skin finally relaxing somewhat at the introduction of clothing. If he found that the coat also relaxing because it smelled like Mantis it was something he didn't dwell on. As soon as the coat was fixed- even if the bottom of the right sleeve hung lank -Liquid left the room.

Then it was a walk back through the rest of Shadow Moses, making his way through the abandoned facility. By some unknown urge he went back to see REX one last time, going down to the hanger and seeing the massive machine slumped against the wall with its jaw agape. Gazing up at the failure of a machine he was suddenly immensely aware by the similarities between REX and Sahelanthropus, the first Metal Gear he'd ever encountered all those years ago and likewise failed with using. Interesting at how Emmerich emulated his father so much, not just in appearance but in bipedal nuclear tank design. Liquid lightly pressed the palm of his remaining hand against the struts of REX's foot, feeling oddly fond of the huge machine in that moment before he left it alone. Regardless of everything he scarified for its creation and his brief flare of sentimentality towards the thing, he wanted nothing else to do with it. If the various governments came and striped its corpse like the jackals they were he wouldn't shed a tear.

After leaving the hanger he did come across the remains of Vulcan Raven with the man's massive vulcan cannon lying among a wide stain of blood on the concrete inside a neighbouring warehouse. Despite that there was no sign of Raven's corpse, instead all that remained was a large conspiracy of ravens who were flocked about the pool of blood or resting upon his discarded gun while cawing softly. Liquid eyed the bloodied beaks and feathers of the glossy birds as they calmly watched him back, knowing immediately that they'd consumed their master. Interesting. He wondered if Wolf's dogs would get hungry enough to do so as well or if they would simply lie down and die next to their mistress.

But it was time for him to leave, as his exhaustion was getting bone deep and he sorely needed rest. He didn't want to stay on Shadow Moses anymore, a island which now just housed ghosts and failure for him. So with that in mind he left the warehouse and Raven's birds behind, making his way back through the base and then down to the ship docks within a massive cave burrowed deep at the back of island. Most of the boats were gone, not doubt the work of the genome soldiers and their panicked flight. Despite a brief flare of irritation Liquid found he largely didn't care. In hindsight the soldiers were all a failure as they lacked any definite _drive_ to fight, so little wonder they all failed to stop his brother. Instead he picked the closest vessel while regretting that his Hind had been destroyed as he would've preferred using that but he didn't bother dwelling on it too much as he switched the boat on. It was a bit awkward steering the boat with only one hand but after a few near misses he adapted and guided the vessel out of the cave and into the open water.

The defenses surrounding the island had died along with them all, so there was no resistance to him breaching the perimeter which used to be heavily trapped but now was inert and useless.

So with that Liquid Snake left Shadow Moses without a backwards glance.

* * *


	2. Domestication

Getting off Shadow Moses and onto the nearby landmass of Alaska was surprisingly easy. 

Finding some to fix up his arm was a slight shade more difficult.

However Liquid had spent quite some time in the underbelly of society and therefore knew where he would find people willing to patch up all sort of injuries yet knew how to keep their mouths shut- for the right price, of course. However Liquid had always been paranoid and selfish, keeping numerous secret accounts ferreted away _just in case._ Those along with many other such things that only himself and Mantis ever knew about including his dozens of pseudo identities to go along with the accounts, despite Ocelot's incessant prying.

While searching for someone adequate he heard about how the American Secretary of Defense, Jim Houseman, ended up being arrested. What for the news didn't specify but Liquid had a fair idea due to the man's meddlesome involvement with Shadow Moses. Considering he was the one who started harping on about nuking or firebombing the island at the first instance of trouble Liquid could understand why those fools in the White House wanted him shoved into a dark closet somewhere with the rest of the skeletons after using him as a scapegoat.

Fitting, really.

By then he was able to buy his way into the black market surgery to be kept off the books by people with no real name like himself. Last thing he wanted was to be found to not have actually died on Shadow Moses, so he made pains to keep himself well off the radar while in disguise and at least the people he tracked down likewise enjoyed intense anonymity. In all honesty he wasn't even sure if the person who fixed his amputation was a man or a woman, due to them keeping such an intense focus on hiding their appearance. Despite that they made sure to prevent any further damage to the limb and even started the first phrase of him gaining a prosthetic to replace his missing limb, even if they couldn't create him the limb itself and sent him on his way.

Still, it was worth the visit and Liquid then went hunting for an engineer for the rest of his arm. Luckily the market for artificial limbs was still growing strong and within a month he located someone willing to make him one off the books, a woman who was only known as 'Barata'. She'd been difficult to track as she moved locations and even countries fairly often. He didn't blame her, as trying to be any sort of independent with her skill set was dangerous but after a while he managed to find her in Brazil. Admittedly she charged far more than any mainstream or military engineer for the replacement but Liquid had the funds for it and she was well known for being effective and quiet so he paid her upfront without complaint. The bionic myoelectric arm prosthesis she fitted him with would take him some time to fully adjust, she'd warned, but even just having it fixed onto him for the first time it felt strangely soothing for his agitated mind. For the past month the phantom pain of his missing limb was like a vicious itching within his skull that he could never scratch but the prosthetic responded as fluidly to his mental commands as his original did, if not being a dull grey colour compared with his usual thickly tanned skin and lacking the same level of sensitivity as flesh.

Barata offered to fit him with optional upgrades, which could include a high-voltage 120V electric shock, a miniature camera-equipped hand that could be released to run free and harm distant enemies, or detachable "Wisp" weapon, capable of capturing and pulling targets back to user. Liquid had no use for such upgrades which sounded fairly annoying barring the electrical one, so he declined. He also declined her offer of using different materials for his new limb, such as synthesized flesh. Liquid had lost his old flesh-and-blood limb, so now he just needed a replacement that worked. The idea of having one mimicking flesh wasn't appealing at all and a part of him knew that having a metallic limb could come in handy during a fight along with being easier upkeep. However he did insist on having her teach him how to maintain the limb which cost him another small fortune; in his mind it was now his body and if there was one thing Liquid knew it was how to take care of it was his own body. Decades of being able to swiftly dismantle and repair guns and other weaponry also aided him in how to learn to repair and upkeep his arm due to its mechanical origins. While he'd never be an expert engineer he did leave Barata feeling confidant in maintaining his current limb but if it did wind up severely damaged he'd need a specialist. Liquid didn't like being dependent on others however, so he decided to just accept it for now and slowly work on figuring out his new arm until it became second nature. 

Another month had passed by the time he was confident in that but he was no longer without his right arm so he and Barata parted ways.

After that Liquid was unsure what to do; his only motive up to that point was to fix his arm and now that was done he was adrift. His past aspirations died on Shadow Moses along with everyone else and Liquid no longer felt the all consuming rage and desire to kill everything Big Boss held dear, to intact vengeance upon the world for creating him lesser and defective to his twin. There was none of that left, not matter how long Liquid brooded on the issues. Even ones that used to make his bare his teeth and fury to wash through his body and mind now left him feeling nothing. No overpowering burning emotion, no desire for vengeance, no urge to get violent retribution on those who wronged him.

He just felt-

Tired.

It was almost worrisome but after a long contemplation Liquid couldn't even muster up the energy to be annoyed about his sudden lack of motivation. He wondered if this was how Mantis felt before he died- just bland acceptance. He was still mad at the _psychic_ , oddly enough, but many other things instilled nothing within him. Ocelot thieving his limb, FOXHOUND failing completely, REX's inadequacy, Shadow Moses and that entire plan being an utter flop- Liquid didn't found the combination of them all more of an annoyance. Just something that was as irritating as a bothersome fly. It was strange since it'd been over two months since he got off that island yet he still felt hollow. He'd attributed that while on Shadow Moses as him suffering from hypothermia and shock from amputation but that clearly wasn't the case.

Even thinking about his twin Solid confused him, for while Liquid harboured a severe rage against the man it felt muted, like the throbbing of a wound. It was a more festering, sullen anger than the towering fury he'd thought it would be. Solid would be punished for it anyway, as Liquid had no doubt the American government had any qualms about using him as a scapegoat. He knew they already had no issues manipulating or blackmailing his twin, what with them essentially abducting him to deal with Shadow Moses and Zanzibarland- he knew with that last one they even killed the man's fifty pet dogs in some bizarre attempt of coercion. Why his twin even had fifty mutts bemused him but Liquid guessed it was his brother's way of dealing with various trauma their kind naturally accumulated over the years. That, along with conspicuous amount of smoking and drinking.

Ironic, really, that it took Liquid dying to find some shred of empathy for what his brother felt.

Though he did find Solid's sheer passiveness throughout Shadow Moses frustrating and thinking about his twin did stir up the embers of his anger, since he was the one who killed Psycho Mantis in the first place. Oddly enough Liquid didn't blame Solid for killing himself, though. Solid hadn't killed him; it was technically FOXDIE cooked up by that two-faced woman Naomi Hunter who did it and from what he heard she was put in a federal prison for being a traitor to America. Fitting, Liquid hoped she rotted in there. Scientist types also did have severe issue when actually confronted with war, too busy simpering behind their statistics and experiments while viewing suffering from behind their cameras and lenses and thinking they in any way understand. If Liquid blamed anyone for killing him it was that scheming wench since it was only when he had the artificial heart attack did he finally fall.

But even with understanding that it was if his mind examined the information, identified the basest of emotional response, and then shunted it to the back of his mind. He felt no urge to seek out his brother, or that woman. He felt rage but it was subdued.

It was after a week of drifting through Salvador did he finally understand what was wrong; he felt more grief over the whole incident than any actual rage. He felt _wounded_. It was foreign and unwelcome but he couldn't shake it off. He couldn't muster up any motivation of vengeance. Instead he just felt the urge to slink away to the shadows and just fester. It was fairly disconcerting to understand, since he'd never been one to do such a thing. But he couldn't summon up the motivation for any kind of revenge so after a great deal of internal debate, he ended up returning to England. 

Nostalgia, maybe. Being a clone he was without nationality but he did regard England more favorably than many other countries and it would be a cold day in Hell where he'd stay in America. Russia, maybe, as he had some fond memories of rampaging through there while a teenager with Mantis but even the thought of it make him ache, as if the wound was still fresh. But with England at least there he wouldn't have to bother with people being suspicious of his accent. That was something that always amused him while in FOXHOUND was how weirdly offended the Americans got over it. Then again that was redundant as he ended up killing them all after his coup and those left didn't care about it or had pronounced accents of their own.

But now he had none of that being an issue but arriving in London and being faced with the crowds and Liquid knew he wouldn't tolerate living in one of the cities; the press of people with their noise and inconsequential babble set his teeth on edge even before he escaped the airport. He knew if he was exposed to that for too long he'd probably winding up killing a few civilians out of frustration and boredom- besides, while Liquid didn't have the same vitriol towards humanity as Mantis had he'd always looked down on civilians. Too soft, too ignorant to everything else within the world.

So instead he began to search for somewhere else to live, far enough from the scrutiny of true civilization but not so far removed as to remind him of the times he spent dwelling within the wilderness. Though he had no desire to seek vengeance, he also had no desire to go back to slogging through the muck or living like he used to be as a half-starved teenager. His pride wouldn't allow it, broken as it was.

After a week he finally brought over one thousand acres of land within North Yorkshire, along with a two story country estate that was already fully furnished. Honestly Liquid just brought that much land out of a desire of privacy and dissatisfaction with any potential neighbours. The sunny faced sales woman who greeted him after his purchase eagerly recounted on the arable land, woodland and other things that came with it.

Liquid couldn't care less in all honesty and was glad the current pseudo identity he was adopting fitted his current ill temper. Still, when she started to get fairly cautious Liquid, despite his current strange state of melancholy, still managed to easily deal with the woman's subtle probing in such a manner it put her back at ease. With her and the money situation sated, she handed over the keys and he was now the sole owner.

He watched her car drive down the long driveway, pull onto the road and vanish out of sight. Something unclenched itself within him as she was gone; being around a civilian left him feeling antsy and severely on edge. At least the faceless doctor and Barata wanted to keep into the shadows like himself, below any radar. But that woman was just too...normal. Just genuinely curious and friendly and it made his proverbial hackles rise.

Shaking that off he unlocked the door to his new house, the air stale and flat. No smell of blood, no snow, no gun powder. Just mothballs and dust. It was normal, if not gaudy enough to appease Liquid's more vain side. No steel walls, no bloodstains, no skeletons half slumped in the corners. No snow. It was just normal. Bland.

Liquid felt tired.

So tired.

So he simply settled down onto the floor and slept.

* * *

The months after Shadow Moses had left him feeling severely disjointed and disconnected, mind dull and with the rest of him feeling overly sensitive. It a confusing, and conflicting mindset which he'd shoved onto the back burner while searching for people to fix his missing right arm and then tracking down a place to live.

Now he'd essentially found somewhere to settle down but intellectually he knew there was a very high chance the Patriots might find him and he'd die. Honestly a part of Liquid welcomed them to try but even through his careful snooping days after he got off Shadow Moses he heard no real news about the whole incident beyond Jim Houseman's arrest which the news didn't even specify why he was being arrested. 

As always the Patriots preferred lurking within the shadows out of the public's eyes and Liquid was unsure if they were aware he was alive. While he'd caught whispers before the Shadow Moses mess he still didn't know how many Patriots they were, just that they had their fingers wrapped around most of the webbing of society. At least that seemed to be more than his twin knew, if Solid's baffled parroting meant anything. He had to admit his brother had been well groomed into a dog of the military. But with that he heard nothing from anyone and at that moment he was more than content to have everyone assume he was dead, killed on that cold island off of Alaska. His blood family he hated and the only person he cared for and vice versa was dead.

Even so, a part of him was still gravely paranoid and jolted at the slightest noise and rustling. At least the place he'd brought wasn't near any large cities and the nearest town was over half an hour away and after some thought he ended up cleaning the entire house, mainly out of a desire to reassure himself that there wasn't any surveillance equipment hidden inside. It was a completely farfetched idea but he had nothing better to do.

Liquid had always been fairly fastidious. While he was out fighting or prowling through foreign jungles or hunting other human beings he wasn't as preoccupied with cleanliness but if the opportunity ever came up to get cleaned he would jump at the chance. Mantis always complaining about dirt and sweat probably contributed to that as well. Liquid had been amused by Mantis's rantings due to the man always insisting on wearing black leather of some sort, which contributed quite a lot to the sweating but Mantis just got annoyed if he pointed that out.

Not to mention Mantis used to be a severely vindictive hair puller so bugging the man about things that riled him up was usually not a good idea, even if boredom and the entertainment value sometimes pushed Liquid into it.

Still, at least searching and cleaning the house from top to bottom gave him something to do and dealing with the smaller, finicky things helped orientate his artificial hand. The lessened sensitivity was a bit of an annoyance but at least it was water and rust proof so he didn't have to worry about it when he started cleaning and polishing all the oak furniture. He did end up breaking one of the chairs by accident, still unsure to the pressure and strength of his prosthetic. That incident assured him he could most likely break bones easy enough if he was in a fight- at least with more ease than using his flesh-and-blood arm. He'd need to test out the fighting capabilities of that limb later.

His first week of living in solitude and near methodical cleaning was marred when the chime of the doorbell rang through the house during midday of the Sunday. Liquid had been in the master bedroom, carefully storing Mantis's FOXHOUND coat in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe he'd just finished cleaning out but his instincts spiked violently at the noise and he tensed automatically. After a brief moment of internal debating he went downstairs to see who was bothering him.

Liquid expected a lot of different people to be lurking outside the door as he opened it; police, military, assassins, tax collectors, perhaps even stray evangelists.

He did not expect the elderly woman standing on his porch, a smile on her weathered face and a pie carefully balanced in her wrinkled hands. As Liquid eyed the old woman he absentmindedly took note of all ways he could subdue or kill her; it wasn't that he wished genuinely harm upon her it was just an ingrained subconscious habit to assess the weaknesses of anyone he met, of how to kill them if anything occurred. It was just important information to know.

Not particularly concerned and more than a little amused he allowed her inside, leading her to the large kitchen. The woman introduced herself no more than 'Mrs Tweedy' and Liquid didn't bother telling her his own. She seemed nonplussed by that, and offered up the pie with a promise that it was made from fresh apples from her tree.

Apparently all the old woman wanted was to 'welcome the newcomer to their lovely neighbourhood' and she had, so she claimed, baked a pie for every newcomer to move in for the last fifty years since she'd turned twenty. Liquid was amused by Mrs Tweedy's persistence in offering friendship to complete strangers but he knew about creating alliances out of necessity though he doubted they needed such, being farmers and all. 

Civilians were certainly odd, so hapless and kind. Little wonder they died by the thousands whenever any kind of war or fighting came their way.

Despite his contempt he also felt the weird sensation of envy, over how something as insignificant as making a pastry for strangers somehow made this woman's day, as she remarked that over the decades her visits led her to meet the most 'fascinating' of people and found life long friends.

Liquid wouldn't know; most people he found annoying or at best tolerable. He only had one person he'd ever called friend over his thirty-odd years of life and he decided to go and die and leave Liquid behind. It was an unfair thought but he still felt resentful and he probably wouldn't forgive Mantis for quite some time.

But regardless, the strange old woman helped drag his mind out of its wallowing and she seemed more interested in telling him her entire life story than badgering him for details over his. Liquid felt grateful for her tact, even if his prosthetic limb and the numerous scars littering his body showed enough that he hadn't lived a particularly peaceful life. It was awkward and amusing, having the woman talk to him about such inane issues and telling him about how she learned the pie recipe from her mother who in turned learned it from _her_ mother. Funny, all he got from his family tree was a meme that entitled warfare and loss. And death, he seemed to take after his father with that even if Liquid only died temporarily.

After nearly an hour of listening to Mrs Tweedy talk about nearly her entire life she finally bid him farewell with a smile. He wasn't sure why, considering he'd been largely silent for her entire conversation but considering what the woman was talking about she was probably used to unusual people. Either way she left after assuring him he could ask her or her husband for anything, and mentioned that a country fair was happening in a fortnight. Liquid had never been less interested in something in his life but he nonetheless thanked the old woman and saw her out of his house. 

He also ate the pie later that night, concluding that a few hours later it wasn't actually poisoned and he was perhaps just paranoid. Still, he wasn't about to inflict rampant social interaction upon himself, especially in the form of curious farm civilians.

* * *

Of course that proved a moot point as exactly one month later the old woman showed up again, this time with her husband in tow. Liquid couldn't be bothered sending them away and he'd always enjoyed social interactions and being the center of attention, even if his death made him adverse towards crowd in general. Spending the month alone in the country side made it obvious as to how everything was so utterly silent barring the fairly placid noises of nature. After over two decades of Mantis's companionship made him used to having at least _someone_ around and the rampant loneliness was an utterly foreign feeling to him.

So, for the time being, he was willing to indulge the old married couple even if he made no effort to share more about his history or background. Neither of the two complained about his evasiveness and seemed to have no issue sharing their own lives, including telling him extensively about their two children and three grandchildren. Of the two daughters one was at university and the other was recently accepted into the army. He found that amusing, as even after leaving Shadow Moses behind the military was never too far away.

Liquid, despite his initial hesitation and sullen behaviour, found himself being inordinately curious of the simple lives these two civilians held. His whole life he'd barely interacted with civilians, typically finding them boorish, weak or so utterly ignorant he wanted nothing to do with them due to being immersed in blood and warfare since he became a child soldier in Africa and right up to his coup of FOXHOUND. But now he found it strangely fascinating, just to hear about these people and their odd, peaceful lives, at how the woman had been born and raised on the farm while her husband moved to England from Australia nearly forty years ago and met his wife at the monthly country fair she'd told him about at their first meeting.

The old couple seemed fairly eager to share their entire life history with him; while they were friendly Liquid gently rebuffed any attempts by them to try bringing him into the nearby social circle and only gave them the bare bones of his pseudo history. While he didn't go out of his way to be hostile, he was well used to subtly coercing people into doing what he wanted or making them be more at ease with him. From the sympathetic to disarmed, it didn't matter and those two seemed to be more trusting that most.

Time would tell if his refusal to kill the old couple would have repercussions but in all honesty Liquid couldn't summon up enough motivation to be overly concerned over it.

* * *

Before he knew it eight months since Shadow Moses had passed and Liquid still felt cold and indifferent towards everything. Sitting around his too-large house and wallowing in misery did loose its appeal after the seventh month mark and he found himself being completely domestic, including sorting out the large yard and garden where the plants had gone completely wild from his neglect. Killing the rosebush was as adventure and Liquid hadn't bled so much since he'd died, and he eventually found out the trees ringing the yard were a range of fruit trees and there was a honey bee nest lurking inside the gardening hut. At least the bees were kinder tenants than the rose bush, even if a few of the confused insects found up tangled in his hair at several different points and he got stung once. It was better than being shot, so he didn't mind it.

Farming wasn't anything he'd ever learned, so the entire thing was a novelty and weirdly enough he found himself enjoying it. It also gave him a topic to breech with the Tweedy's, who were pleased to have him actually broach a topic with them.

He planted dozens of wild flowers, such as hollyhocks, marigolds, asters and snowflowers. He didn't know the first thing about botany aside from which were poisonous and which weren't but bees apparently liked them so hopefully some would bloom or not. He'd find out in time. If he was going to be stuck here then he'd have an aesthetically pleasing home. Or house. He still didn't see it as his home yet, as it could take years for Liquid to finally feel at ease in his currently location; even while younger, so young he was barely more than a child, the only place he'd stayed in for a long period of time was when Cipher had him captive. Or XOF. He wasn't sure what those idiots had been calling themselves at the time, he lost count of the names.

But regardless Liquid had always been on the move and even while a POW he'd been shifted around on a semi-regular basis. Now he'd been in the same spot which was slowly approaching a year but nothing catastrophic happened. It was safe to conclude the world thought him dead, or at least irrelevant. The revelation didn't bother him that much, simply making him pause one day while kneeling in the dirt digging up a thistle patch before he carried on. For so long he'd been fighting that, against being a off-cast garbage of a failed science project but ever since dying and losing Mantis he just didn't care anymore. At least not about those things.

That urge to just hide away and lick his wounds in the distance also contributed to him never using the television or computer in the house; aside from his weekly cleaning which was more of a boredom thing he didn't touch them. He had no interest in the outside world and beyond the persistent old couple, the placid hive of bees and the odd flock of birds he was left alone.

He did, however, find a herd of horses living on the other side of the hill on the massive back paddock a week later when he was tracking down the various hare and rabbit homes littering the country side. He didn't even notice them at first, due to half of the paddock being covered in bush and crisscrossed with various streams and he was inspecting an abandoned warren dug from the creak side among the thick layer of star of Bethlehem's and sun star flowers, when he heard a soft neigh which snagged his attention away from the flowers.

Interestingly enough the herd was a mix of breeds, many of which weren't native to Britain and some of which Liquid knew were actually fairly rare animals. There were some draft horses including a massive Percheron with a speckled coat and half-blind eyes standing next to a towering Shire, several Baroque horses, two Warmbloods in black and grey, six New Forest ponies and, strangely enough, a small Misaki horse nibbling at some grass on the water bank. There was also a Colonial Spanish horse and a Oriental lurking nearby with the Oriental's bony limbs looking almost comical as it picked its way carefully across the shallow stream, short coat being a light shimmering gold.

The horse seemingly in charge of the wayward herd was a tall Andalusian mare with a snowy white coat and she seemed supremely unimpressed with Liquid's antics as he skirted around the herd. She, unlike most of the other equines, didn't shy away from him at all and simply regarded him with dark, intelligent eyes when he approached her. He wasn't foolish enough to get within range of her teeth and hooves so he just watched her carefully while the concerned whinnying of the other horses drifted around him.

The mare looked at him and gave what he could only call a snort of disgust. Liquid shrugged before leaving the herd to their own business.

The next day however he found the herd grazing in the paddock just behind the house as if they'd always been there. The Andalusian mare however had taken it a step further, having jumped into the backyard and was eating the apples hanging from one of the trees. Liquid just gave her an irritated look but otherwise left her to her own devices. He wasn't that much of a gardener even with his random flower attempts so if she ripped up the lawn with her hooves he didn't care that much.

* * *

By then the seasons had turned and he was bemused to find a year had passed since Shadow Moses. If anything, the anniversary called for a celebration.

Liquid had never really been prone to drinking, especially not to the alcoholic level his twin would reportedly reach, as Liquid knew from his nosing of his brother's background.

Getting completely drunk however was a relatively new concept to him. The last time he remembered ever being drunk was when he was a teenager and was curious enough to try it after they found a bottle of whisky after destroying a camp of foreign soldiers while skulking through Russian. Mantis found the whole thing enraging, due to the psychic getting drunk by proxy through their mental link. Honestly Liquid couldn't really remember much of what happened, just waking up in the middle of a burnt out base and covered in ash while missing most of his clothes and a fairly large chunk of his hair. Mantis didn't speak to him for a week after that incident so he didn't do it again.

However Mantis was dead, so Liquid didn't have to listen to angry recriminations or be inflicted with the silent treatment, so the next time he slunk around the nearby town he ended up buying some alcohol. Getting completely drunk off four bottles of syrah red wine and white Russian vodka probably wasn't one of the best ideas he'd had. Despite being severely hungover and still fairly drunk the next day he still made himself get up at dawn as usual and clean up the mess in the house. Several vases had been broken and the piano had an elaborate pattern caved within from various kitchen knives and he had no idea where one of the chairs from the living room had vanished to. He also discovered he'd forgotten to shut the front door and the two of the New Forest ponies were asleep on the leather couch while a third was nibbling at the Japanese peace lily in the corner. Like most things with flowers Liquid didn't know if regular nibbling was good for a plant of the spathiphyllum genus but he was relatively sure the plant was poisonous to horses so he quickly shooed the pony away from the lily, not really in the mood to deal with a dead equine in his house. Never mind he had the knives on hand to prepare it if the pony did die and he'd eaten horse but for some reason he didn't want the meddlesome pony to die, so he just shoved it outside before taking the lily upstairs. When he came back the white mare and the golden Oriental were in the front hallway and Liquid just ignored them before going to the kitchen to try his hand at a hangover remedy. 

* * *

The horses ended up becoming a stable theme in his life after that, to the point he was sure none of them had even been truly wild. He'd wager they had escaped or been left behind by the previous owner and formed their own mongrel herd. Eventually they all warmed up to his presence, or at least tolerated him being around.

At one point the Andalusian mare approached him and herded him down to one of the back paddocks until they came across the Shire with one massive leg tangled up in some loose barbed wire. Getting the giant horse free was muddy, exhausting work especially considering it was raining heavily but if anything the burn in his muscles was a familiar and comforting feel and even the wire biting into his skin felt almost pleasant.

Still, it was an hour before he'd freed the huge beast from the wire and mud and then he had to guide it back through the rain. He also got the impression the white mare would kick him if he left it to its own devices as she remained close to the Shire as it limped slowly along while Liquid kept his prosthetic hand pressed against its massive neck. He nearly ran into the Percheron when they reached the paddock ringing the house and who, due to her blindness, didn't even notice the three from where she was contentedly munching on a apple tree while completely ignoring the pouring rain.

By then he was saturated, bloodied and splattered with mud and the clothes he was wearing were ruined but felt more alive than he had in months. Wallowing in mud and bleeding brought back many memories of his ill-spent youth but it lacked the bitter emptiness most of his nostalgia brought about. 

He did, however, buy some devil's claw and yucca for the Shire to help the swelling of its injured leg- it was technically his horse, after all.

* * *

A few months after the first year of Shadow Moses had passed Liquid had, by all accounts, finally relaxed. The brittle tension in his body had eased and his prosthetic now seemed as natural as his flesh-and-blood limb. At times when it was particularly cold the joint would ache but it was mild compared to some of the pains he'd felt over the year. His body kept fit due to the various tasks he listed himself with, from ripping out knotted tree trunks, planting rows of crops with his hands, digging up new drainage systems and taking care of the horses which remained as nosy as ever. Even moreso since he'd rescued the Shire and while the huge horse had some scarring on its back leg it had otherwise fully recovered.

The rabbits and hares were being an immense annoyance however and luckily enough the pseudo identity he'd adopted for Yorkshire allowed him to buy several guns- he ended up ripping out the shelves in the first floor living room to make a gun cabinet and the red tape surrounding getting the weapons nearly made him want to rip his hair out. But he eventually was allowed to have shotguns and rifles, as while he was all for hunting game with his bare hands the sheer amount of the bothersome rodents was getting near plague level.

He also ended up buying a harrier puppy, figuring a dog would be quite helpful in ridding the land of the pests and while the horses were rather interesting company he was fed up with having to replace the carpet so often. Also he was getting bored again and that never boded well for himself as getting bored usually entailed gratuitous murder.

He wasn't exactly inventive with naming, so he just called her Harrier and trying to train a puppy was ridiculously time consuming task.

However luckily enough Harrier was seemingly more intelligent than the Genome soldiers and she steadily began to soak up his lessons and due to constant exposure she didn't fear the horses and vice versa. He even woke up at one point to find her curled up against one of the Warmblood's side, fast asleep. She did seem inordinately cuddly, a habit he was unable to train her out of as the weeks passed and in many cases she woke up a few seconds before he did so she could crawl up the bed and lick his face until he woke up.

It made him remember the time he'd spent in the Middle East, hunting foxes with harriers. Now however, he mainly hunted rabbits and hares. 

At least the meat was relatively tasty if prepared right. He'd eaten worse.

* * *

He did end up taking Harrier for a walk. He was still unsure why, but if he thought on it enough he'd assume he had finally filled up his quota for misery-induced isolation and wanted to nose out the nearby town, considering he'd spent two years being cooped up in his house and only interacting with the animals and those two elderly neighbours who were overly persistent.

In retrospect it was fairly disgusting; he was all but _domesticated._ However he couldn't work up the effort to care that much. He didn't care about much these days.

Having Harrier did have the advantage of a lot of people direct their attention to her. She was trained enough to tolerate their behaviour and Liquid was still deft at social interactions despite his rustiness. It was mainly information gathering, with the civilians at large being farmers or other harmless professions. There were a family of bakers, a old woman who'd been the librarian for over half a century, a man who was missing an eye and raised all the goats the town used and a odd, wizened man who claimed he was a wizard. Honestly Liquid needed to stop regarding the humans as fascinating, as it seemed like he was studying them like new breeds of beetles. But it had been so long since he'd been around a crowd of them; growing up it was just fighting, bloody battles and long trips with his only friend. Even in the British Special Forces he was surrounded by like-minded individuals and the civilians were an amusing group. 

They were very curious towards him as well, being a new comer in a town so close knit. Most had the sense to leave him alone beyond vague questions but a few were more invasive when he was bemused enough to go into the pub. All his senses were on high alert, like a sensory overload so he was profoundly aware of everything that was happening and he knew so vividly he'd be able to kill everyone inside without issue. Harrier, though she wasn't fully grown yet, would be able to kill a few as well as Liquid hadn't skimped on her self defense training.

He did fob off any offers for a drink, stating he only drunk on the anniversary of his greatest loss. Most assumed it was about his right arm and whatever occurred for him to loose it but he offhandedly mentioned it also involved a person. After that they didn't bother him about it, and Liquid could tell many of their minds shifted from suspicious to sympathy. Odd, them having such emotion for a man they had only met once. It certainly proved civilians had no preservation instincts whatsoever, considering he was technically a mass murderer and terrorist. Oh well.

By the end of it and when he felt he was about to explode into some gratuitous violence from overexposure he finally extracted himself from the group and went back home, Harrier close at his heels. From the few snatches of conversation he overheard before he disappeared Liquid's reputation among the townsfolk had apparently shifted from 'creepy shut in' to 'eccentric rich widower'. 

Mantis would've hurled a desk in his face if he'd known Liquid was allowing the civilians to work under the impression the psychic was his late wife.

* * *

During the third year he accidentally killed the mailman. 

Harrier ate well that week.

The police never did find the body.

* * *

Fourth year marked nearly ten more horses being introduced to the herd. They were mixed breeds, bastardized offspring of the original herd.

He should probably name them.

But then, they were horses. He doubted they cared what he thought. Despite that he brought some grooming equipment and spent the next week cleaning up all the horses. The Oriental and Colonial Spanish horse in particular took to the grooming with relish and by the end of it their golden coats were gleaming. They were all technically his, and Liquid took care of his possessions even if they were a bunch of mix-matched equines with attitude problems. 

* * *

With the fifth year he briefly left Britain to get a checkup on his prosthetic. He left Harrier with the Tweedy's, the two being happy to look after her while he left, hunting down Barata to have her inspect his right arm. He paid for an entirely new replacement but like before declined any upgrades or the fleshy material. It was a replacement limb and that's all he wanted.

The entire ordeal took nearly three months, Barata being even harder to find. From her comments Liquid would guess the Private Military Companies had been head hunting her severely hence her even more sporadic habits. She also expressed concern for how the PMC were becoming more and more powerful but Liquid wasn't bothered; humans had been trying to kill one another since the dawn of time. If they just got more organized he didn't care so he left back to Britain without fanfare after his prosthetic was replaced. However he did take several dismantled guns back with him, smuggling them through customs without an issue.

Old habits were hard to break after all.

* * *

Liquid was very bemused one day when he turned on the rarely used television and ended up watching a documentary about past 'infamous' Presidents of the United States and found out that the forty third President of the USA was a man who looked nigh identical to Big Boss, expect for having pure white hair and both of his eyes. While Liquid typically found such documentaries boring and akin to propaganda, his sheer curiosity over this 'George Sears' prompted him to watch the entire thing. George Sears apparently served from 2001 to 2006 before his abrupt resignation and only resurfaced a few years later and was apparently only one of two Presidents who resigned, the other being Richard Nixon, and he was later classified as a terrorist due to murdering his successor James Johnson and crashing a gigantic mobile fortress called Arsenal Gear into Manhattan before apparently being killed by an unknown assailant in 2009. 

The whole thing reminded Liquid of the few times he was bored enough to watch those documentaries about aliens; most of the documentary seemed to be based off rumours, speculations, and thousands of videos either stolen or taken by civilians or personnel which were fuzzy or hard to decipher. There was even some shaky footage obviously filmed by a cellphone with George Sears, or 'Solidus', having a sword fight with a lithe white haired man on top of Federal Hall, followed by a few shots of the man bleeding heavily in front of the statue of George Washington before dying. Despite this, his body was never located which led to rampant rumours over him not truly dying, including one middle aged woman insisting 'Mister Sears' was actually her wayward husband and he was living in Alaska for his own protection while she took care of things in the USA. The rest of the documentary dissolved into fairly wild conversations about just who this Solidus was and why he even was President, along with more debate over whether or not he was really dead and what the whole point of Arsenal Gear was besides being used as a battering ram for Manhattan which was still recovering from the attack.

After the closing credits ended Liquid found himself laughing; apparently his withdrawal from society was bad enough he utterly missed the reveal of another wayward brother who for some bizarre reason was the President of the United States for a while before deciding to use a city-sized nuclear warship via crashing it into Manhattan before getting into a sword fight on top of the Federal Hall and dying.

Another clone and if the times used within the documentary were accurate, this George had been president during the Shadow Moses incident which meant he must have been aware of everything that had happened- and most likely ordered it. 

_Interesting._

Then he heard a soft whicker and glanced over at the nearby window; the white Andalusian mare was standing in the garden with her nose pressed right up against the glass while watching him with bright eyes.

The two stared at each other for almost a minute before the mare snorted and turned away with a flick of her long tail.

* * *

After that however Liquid began to gain more interest in what was happening in the outside world, reluctantly coming out of his isolation somewhat. Finding more information about Solidus Snake was difficult despite the man's ridiculously high profile life before his death- why the Patriots made him the President Liquid still didn't understand -but he eventually found snippets of the man's odd life and his presidential campaign.

He also discovered and brought a copy of a book called _In the Darkness of Shadow Moses: The Unofficial Truth_ which was written by a woman called Nastasha Romanenko which had been published a year after the incident.

There was an interesting authors note just before the book got started, a quick sentence of, _"I dedicate this book to the casualties of Shadow Moses as well as to all those who suffered the tyranny of the nuclear weapons -- and to Richard Ames." - Nastasha Romanenko._

Liquid wondered if this Nastasha was including all the dead members of FOXHOUND; considering they were the casualties of Solid's mission he was quite sure but they'd all been classified as terrorists and, in a few cases, outright labeled as murderers. Having sympathy given to them from a complete stranger was interesting and he had little doubt the woman would've scoffed at him if they met in real life considering he'd made that foolish Emmerich man create a walking nuclear weapon.

He also wondered what happened to REX.

To his amusement, while the book was faithful towards his brother's involvement in Shadow Moses along with outlining how they used him as a carrier for FOXDIE, in the times it referred to members of FOXHOUND, in particular himself and Psycho Mantis, a lot of it was conjecture and speculation. Mantis in particular she seemed to have trouble fully comprehending and dissolved into many pages of rumours and heresies over the apparent 'Extraordinary' who tagged alongside the FOXHOUND leader's side. Despite that she did accurately describe Liquid himself, including elaborating on the Black Project he was a part of or more commonly known as Les Enfants Terribles. That part was fascinating, as there were quite a few tidbits within that even he wasn't aware of but, unlike so many years ago just after Shadow Moses, rage shifted within his gut when he read the passes about the project. It was like the almost cooled embers of a fire; buried and nearly snuffed out but capable of being stirred back into life.

The anger was now so foreign due to himself being distanced from it it took him off guard but it was still sullen enough it didn't stir him into action and he devoted himself to reading the rest of the book without incident.

He did feel slightly flattered when the Nastasha woman declared his actions as, _'It was an act of political violence on a scale the world had never seen, a blow that threatened to send the Damocles' sword of nuclear warfare into a free-fall.'_ But the rest of the book left him feeling unsure; the whole elaboration of the various Black Projects the USA had cooked up irritated him.

But that was long done and throwing a revenge fit just resulted in him dying. Frankly there were times when he couldn't never remember what he'd been angry about. Even now his anger was weak enough enough he couldn't be bothered doing something about it.

He kept the book on the mantelpiece.

* * *

Learning of those incidents encouraged him to become slightly more invested in what was actually happening in the outside world and he even found out through the Tweedys's, after some extremely subtle probing, that the military had introduced nanomachines at large due to their daughter being a member of the British military. Liquid had grimaced at the stupidity; even after joining FOXHOUND he'd refused point blank to be injected with nanomachines since back then they'd been fairly experimental and his rampant paranoia hadn't allowed him to be injected with something which controlled his body to such a complex level. His brother's stupidity with FOXDIE certainly proved Liquid's fears, as a the moronic man had utterly no idea he had been used as a prototype living plague machine after allowing a unknown scientist to use him as a testing zone.

Honestly at times Liquid hadn't even been sure how his brother had learned basic human speech, considering how ridiculous he'd behaved back on Shadow Moses. There had been times Liquid had to rein in blistering sarcasm at his twin's utterly oblivious nature, including Solid's bafflement being called 'brother' by him as if the obvious answer hadn't been written onto their faces.

As for the mainstreaming of nanomachines, Liquid found the entire idea distasteful and felt deep unease over the notion. Due to being an older generation, the Tweedy's shared his opinion but that seemed to be moreso not understand the microscopic machines in general; Liquid already knew the level they infested someone and having the military's of the world at large using them seemed like an immense Achilles heel.

But he wasn't in the military anymore and if the fools wanted to bind themselves to technology that controlled their very core it was their business and he'd just watch and see it all come crashing down from afar.

* * *

The eighth year since Shadow Moses slowly arrived. After his ritual bout of rampant alcoholism and hang over, he spent a large portion of his time inspecting his reflection in the bedroom mirror. 

He was now over forty years old; in all honesty Liquid had never expected to grow this old. It was a privilege his kind was rarely afforded and while he did technically die on that island he didn't stay dead. While he still had his impressive musculature and his skin had gotten even more heavily tanned over his years in the country side, the creases lining the thinner skin of his face had gotten deeper. His hair was also longer, hanging past his shoulder blades and towards the middle of his back and was a deep burnished gold. It'd probably start going grey soon, but at the moment he couldn't see any discolouration and quite frankly found the whole aging process fascinating considering he'd expected to be dead far before he would be able to experience it.

The long tattoo of a snake curling around a sword had faded slightly from his years in the sun and the numerous scars littering his body were pale. He spent nearly an hour, hung over and feeling oddly fragile, tracing the various scar tissue with the fingers of his prosthetic hand, mind heavy with memories.

Mantis would've punched him if he'd been around to see Liquid get so nostalgic in his old age.

* * *

That winter it snowed so heavily Liquid couldn't even see anything outside the window barring the flurry of white. His prosthetic joint ached from the cold and in a fit of pique he smashed a large portion of the wooden furniture and lit the vast fireplace in the living room.

Harrier approved of the heat, even if she'd growled and raised her hackles when he started breaking furniture.

The next few days was shoveling snow and getting annoyed at how much the thankless work reminded him of Shadow Moses.

* * *

Midway through that year he suddenly snapped awake in the dead of night, feeling a sudden _twist_ within his mind. Shaking he slowly sat up, sweat beading his brow and bile thick in his throat. He hadn't felt that sensation in over half a decade; the last time he'd felt something like that was when Mantis had been killed back on Shadow Moses. Admittedly the months after he felt the occasionally phantom pain within his mind but this felt so fresh. So vivid it was painful.

Harrier whined from where she was curled up on the foot of the bed but otherwise didn't move as Liquid pressed the heel of his palm against his brow, heart hammering in his chest. He tried reaching out with his mind, something which had become second nature through his decades of friendship with Mantis. Now it was like he was fumbling in the dark with no response from the other end of the long inert mental link. But he was so convinced he'd felt something.

He didn't sleep for the rest of the night, nor did he feel anything else.

* * *

When the eighth year since Shadow Moses passed began to reach its end the strange dreams started. 

Liquid wasn't a stranger to dreams, however due to his mindset he never suffered from nightmares. He didn't regret all the people he'd killed and mutilated over the years, all the lives he ended- either cleanly of messily, it didn't matter. He remembered Solid complaining about that in the Codex conversations while he was disguised as Miller which forced him to comfort the man in a rather bizarre turn of events but truthfully Liquid couldn't empathize with his brother's remorse or bitter mindset over the people he'd killed over the years; Liquid didn't regret any of his killings. If anything he regretted not killing more people when he had the chance though unlike Mantis he did have some self control and found killing civilians, noncombatants and children boring and unnecessary in most instances. Mantis just killed anyone, including a few instances where he murdered the cleaning staff of Shadow Moses because he was bored. Liquid had lectured him about it but that was mainly due to the fact they now didn't have anyone to clean up the bloody mess he'd made.

But regardless, because of that he rarely suffered any kind of dream that caused him anxiety or guilt, due to coming to terms with his nature as a teenager. Now however he was having strange, vivid dreams almost every night that left him in a severe state of panic or fear before jolting violently awake. The dreams seemed to vary wildly but they all seemed to real and caused a very real emotional response from him when he woke from them.

One was him just torturing and dismembering faceless people, numerous bloody instruments held in his hands while the hysterical, high pitched laughter of a girl echoed through the room before the dream shifted with him vomiting up thick black ink while severed limbs crawled through the bile as he mutilated and tore apart even more people strapped to a table by the writing arms of an octopus. There was another dream where he was stumbling through bush and jungle, with the soles of his feet bloodied and torn while he held a maggot-riddled corpse of an infant in his arms as a tall bloody wolf loped around him, snarling and biting at the air. The next was being sealed within a cage made of razor wire which dissolved into boiling blood and suddenly he was free and flying across a chaotic battle field covered in bloods and mutilated bodies in the form of a raven before swooping down and tearing apart the warring soldiers below with a long sword-like beak and claws.

Liquid didn't mind the last dream that much, to be honest.

There was also one that was barely more than a whisper; he'd only catch a glimpse of piles of bodies and his teeth sinking into the yielding flesh before he woke up from that one.

He wasn't prone to indulging in torture or dragging around the rotted carcasses of babies. The one filled with gratuitous cannibalism was interesting on further reflection, since he wasn't above killing people with his teeth (and had done so in the past) and in all honesty he had no real taboo against cannibalism if he was forced to that. Not that he had, but if he was in a situation between eating the flesh of a fellow human and dying he wouldn't hesitate. 

Interestingly enough the dreams shifted and he cycled through the four with regularity but while some aspects changed at their core they remained steady; the torture sessions with the laughter ringing above, the rotten baby accompanied by a dying wolf and bloodied feet, the fury and frenzied joy of tearing through opponents on a bloodied battle field be they soldiers or fleeing civilians.

Another dream lingered at the edge of his consciousness however, a eerie pulsing dream filled with blood, darkness and the screams of the dying. Despite it he never seemed to get it as vivid as the other three, something which made him feel almost pained as the odd dream lingering at the edge brought a deep feeling of nostalgia and longing. It was interesting, feeling such yearning for a dream.

Whenever he woke up from one of the dreams he'd feel disjointed and severely emotional. The first time he woke up from the oddly detailed torture session dream he kept on having random bouts of giggling and when he was outside digging up a wayward patch of thistles in the yard he'd started laughing hysterically until he could hardly breathe and doubled over laughing until his gut felt like it was about to split open. He came to half an hour later, lying in the dirt on his side while the white mare lipped at his hair. If it involved the wolf he'd wake up with tear tracks staining his face and a heavy stomach which made him feel like he'd eaten rocks. The one that involved the brutal killings left him the most stable- he was used to fury and murderous rage, an old companion that'd boosted him through his life and forced him to keep moving. Even so, it'd been quite some time he felt rage so acutely and quite a few pieces of furniture and walls found themselves victim to his mood swings.

After some serious introspection Liquid finally decided his mind was finally fracturing after decades of violence and bloodshed, perhaps even coming to terms with his death on Shadow Moses. But at the end of the day no one was around to see his breakdowns and fits and he didn't care enough to worry about it too much. As for the final dream the one that left him with such longing he felt sick, he wasn't sure what to make of it.

But in the end he was no psychiatrist and even as a child was never partially stable. He wasn't about to become such and had no idea even how to be. And frankly, Liquid had no interest in doing so.

* * *

The dreams remained a staple in his life for the next few months, with made him a mixture of fascinated and exasperated. On the one hand he'd never had so many lurid dreams, on the other hand after each dream he'd feel severely emotional and out of sorts. The last few times he'd felt so mentally disorientated and overwhelmed was back when he was a child and mentally fusing with Mantis for the first time and after dying on Shadow Moses. Now however, he had absolutely no idea what was happening and their link remained inert, with no response from the other end as it had been for years.

Just a strange invasion of foreign thoughts and feels but now there seemed to be no base, no source. If left him feeling sick and yearning for something he wasn't sure of. 

The dreams filled with tearing people apart with his bare hands were comforting, ironically enough. Vengeance and fury- those emotions had been, at times, the only things keeping him alive. The ones with the mass slaughter of babies, gratuitous torture and cannibalism were a bit more unusual. They were so vivid they felt more like memories at times, strangely disjointed yet so familiar and real. They would sometimes shift to sterile rooms filled with needles and encroaching blackness, with the sensation of suffocation but those were far more rare and weak.

Another consistent theme of all the dreams were that he apparently wasn't in his body any more; he noticed occasionally while he was butchering people or smothering the rows of infants the hands he used for the grisly deeds were far smaller and delicate than his own; even as a child his hands lacked the frailness of the limbs, as if he was in the bodies of small girls.

Then again, he had mistaken Mantis for a girl when they first met, so he wasn't sure if that line of thought was even correct. 

Maybe he really was going insane.

* * *

Everything changed when he discovered the existence of Outer Heaven and Liquid Ocelot.

It was completely by accident, ironically enough. He couldn't even remember what he was doing in town, sitting on a bench and watching people while patting Harrier as she sat obediently at his heels. Liquid did that fairly often, his perception still being good enough to pick up the flaws in the civilians as they went about their lives, at how the baker's daughter walked with a slight limp to compensate her sore right knee, at how the shopkeeper on the corner was partially blind but refused to buy glasses even though he would always stumble over the curb, at how there were exactly twenty eight sparrows living in the park's main tree with one being completely white.

It was placid but Liquid enjoyed it; it reminded him of all the times he'd stalked and observed targets before killing them back when he was active and by now the townsfolk were used to his eccentric behaviour. However everything was thrown out of its placid state when he heard something which instantly caught all of his attention, causing him to twist around so quickly he nearly wrenched a muscle in his back.

 _Outer Heaven is in command by some man supposedly called Liquid Ocelot._

Instantly he found the source, his neighbours the Tweedy's accompanied by someone who could only have been their daughter. Judging from her posture Liquid knew instantly this was the one in the military and she looked by all accounts to be visiting her parents while on leave. Why the three chose that day to spend time in the park at the rare times Liquid chose to visit the town was a chance Liquid didn't bother brooding over and before he could think twice he was up and moving.

He nearly knocked over Mrs Tweedy at how quickly he was there, startling the three while Harrier growled by his side, aggravated by her master's agitated state.

Liquid wasted no time in demanding information and according to the bewildered daughter she'd apparently been deployed to the Middle East for the past six months helping with resistance efforts to forcible occupation. However, the confused woman elaborated, most of that came to an end when a massive private military company called Outer Heaven had been called in and suddenly the area had been swarming with so many foreign mercenaries their military actions had been forced to withdraw temporarily.

A company which was apparently led by a man named Liquid Ocelot, who was said to have amassed the most powerful of the PMC's on earth and contained elite troops; most known as Heaven Troopers or the FROGS along with, as the woman continued nervously under Liquid's unyielding stare, what was rumoured to be a powerful psychic in charge of three most dangerous Outer Heaven troops known only as the 'Beasts' which apparently the psychic controlled. She'd never met them personally, she finished, but those few that did survive the encounters spoke of mind control and of witnessing people killing their own allies. All on the behest of the Beasts controlled by this Ocelot.

_Liquid Ocelot. A psychic. Mind control._

* * *

The next few days were a blur with Liquid devoting every waking moment trying to figure out just _what_ was happening. He'd been so isolated, even after trying to expand his limited exposure to the outside world after learning about Solidus; so many things he'd heard about over the years were falling into place while he searched up Outer Heaven and the PMC's involved in the supposed war economy.

Liquid learned of the mercenary groups which made up Outer Heaven; Praying Mantis, Octopus Armament, Raven Sword, Werewolf and Clawing Ocelot. All names that were references towards the members of FOXHOUND who were present for Shadow Moses; Psycho Mantis, Decoy Octopus, Vulcan Raven, Sniper Wolf and Revolver Ocelot. That couldn't been a coincidence, much like the leader's strange bastardization of his name. He knew Ocelot had survived Shadow Moses, but other than that he hadn't cared what the backstabbing old man had gotten up to. Clearly that had been a mistake.

Now the fool was in charge of the largest mercenary company on Earth and some of the most elite soldiers on the planet. Trying to find more about who were on Ocelot's payload was more difficult, with no official information given whatsoever and the rest being rumours and heresy given by those who encountered the troops and posted their opinions online about it or gave television statements.

Liquid had been certain all those months ago that he'd felt Psycho Mantis's presence in his mind again, or how those invasive dreams were somehow linked to it. Now he was sure it wasn't just him slowly going insane from his decades of horror and warfare. He'd felt Mantis because somehow the psychic had came back to life.

How, he had no idea but if anyone was able to do so it would be a psychic of his power and Liquid himself had cheated death. The odd dreams, he was still unsure why he was having them, but they must've had something to do with their mental link; it was still inert and incomplete but that could be because Liquid had never found Mantis in whatever state he currently was to reestablish it. Mantis had been the telepath between them and he'd created the link while children and when they reunited as adults after Liquid's stint as a POW and Mantis from the FBI the psychic had been the one to reach out and flick their link back on. 

His whole body burned with excitement, apprehension and wariness; it had been now a decade since he'd decided to return to the fight and it was on a hunch that his old companion was alive. For all he knew Liquid could hunt down Ocelot and find that the psychic the old fool had on his roster was just a different psychic with no relation and the names he'd picked were only for nostalgia value.

But if it _was_ true...

* * *

The next day Liquid had packed all the gear he'd need; the dismantled guns he brought so long ago after replacing his prosthetic arm, any documents relating to his pseudo identity he'd been living under for the past decade, and Mantis's old FOXHOUND coat. Due to its durability, being made to withstand typical mercenary hazards like being shot and set on fire, the coat was only dusty and discoloured when he removed it from its place in the wardrobe. Putting it on was overly sentimental perhaps but he could potentially find Mantis who could call him out him over it.

He left Harrier with the Tweedy's who were happy to look after her, especially when he mentioned he needed to go sort some of his personal life out. They never questioned his odd behaviour the days before when he accosted them in the park, but they were at an age they knew when to be quiet. He had been tempted at one point to bring Harrier with him, as he'd trained her in attack, but after some thought he decided against bringing her.

If he _did_ meet Mantis again there was a high chance he would just kill Harrier, since he had disliked animals in general back when he was alive and Liquid guessed dying wouldn't improve his disposition. Liquid had grown fond of his dog so she was left behind. The horses could fend for themselves and Liquid had little doubt they'd get along just fine if he'd died while hunting down his old squad members.

After that was done he left to the nearest city and found the closest airport.

Once there he booked the earliest flight leaving for the Middle East, one way.

* * *


	3. Bird Watcher

It took nearly a fortnight of searching through the Middle East before he found any solid leads. Conflict brought about by the various private military companies had spread to many towns and even some of the cities but despite his decade of inactivity some things were just inscribed upon his subconscious. He kept low and out of sight, skulking around the outskirts of the fighting and mainly observing the soldiers fighting each other. He would occasionally catch a glimpse of the odd civilian but otherwise they had the good sense to stay out of the hot zones.

He knew Arabic, which was a blessing as he was at least able to understand a lot of the conversations he'd overheard. His Persian on the other hand was fairly atrocious and hardly worth mentioning. However combined with that and the influx of invasive foreign troops who dominant language were English, he made do.

The first week was just getting his bearings and figuring out the current situation with all the PMC's everywhere. In all honesty he was unsure about where Outer Heaven, which Liquid Ocelot was in control of, was currently based at and trying to dig up more information on it proved annoyingly hard. However the PMC's belonging to Outer Heaven were rumoured to have been deployed, which meant he needed to find those bases, search them for information (or torture it from some personnel if need be) and use that to figure out where Outer Heaven was.

Then...well, he'd figure that part out when it happened. Truthfully he didn't really have a plan beyond that which in hindsight was a bit ridiculous but Liquid felt too emotional to really think it through. It strange, being so saturated with emotions that he sometimes found it difficult to think coherently at certain points when he'd been numb and disjointed for nearly a decade. Now everything felt razor sharp and vivid while his muscles burned with energy and anticipation. 

He also steadily adapted to the heat, even if wearing the FOXHOUND coat left him covered in sweat but it did stop him from getting sunburned during the harsh midday sun. Dust slowly covered him and his boots were caked in dirt. He tied his long hair back in a loose pony tail and stole a hood from some discarded supplies, alongside a machete. The paranoia of anyone recognizing him was nonsensical but Liquid decide to err on the side of caution in that instance as he needed to be focused on the task at hand and not annoying Patriot involvement, even if that was a rather moot point considering Ocelot's involvement.

However he needed more Intel, more supplies as well so he took a detour in the next small town he was in. The troops there were only a small team of less than a dozen, based at a radio tower in the outskirts and by the time he reached them it was twilight, which almost made it child's play for him to eliminate them all.

He killed the five perimeter guards easily enough, sneaking up behind them individually before seizing a hold of them and slicing their throats open ear-to-ear. The only noise was the gurgles coming from their slashed windpipes as he silently put them on the ground to fully bleed out. 

Three more soldiers were standing around a small fire and chatting animatedly with one another; one he killed when she made the mistake of leaving the relative safety of the light from the flames, griping the base of her skull and her chin while wrenching violently until he snapped her neck and she slumped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The next two were a bit more tricky, as they became wary when their companion didn't return after five minutes but they made the mistake of venturing out and panicking over finding her body, checking instead to see if she was alive due to her bloodless corpse instead of sounding an alarm right away.

He slammed the machete into the man's head, the sharp blade sinking past hair, blood and bone until it sank right into his sponge of his brain and killed him. The next one Liquid pounced on before he could muster anything other than a started exclamation, jamming the muzzle of his silenced pistol against the underside of the soldiers jaw and firing. Like the other, he died instantly. 

The last three were sleeping in their makeshift beds in a tent pitched a few yards from the tower base; he crept inside and killed all three without issue.

The commander however was perspective enough she noticed Liquid's presence when he skulked up behind her and pivoted quickly in place, quick enough to stop a blade from going through her spinal cord with her pistol, while her other hand yanked her own knife from her belt and slashed it up at his face. He blocked with his right forearm and the blade ineffectively hit his mechanical wrist with a sharp noise and with a grunt she slammed an elbow into his chest. 

Quickly he pulled up his left hand and struck the side of her jaw at an angle with the flat of his hand, dislocating the bone with a wet _pop_. To his surprise the woman barely even flinched, pulling her knife free of his wrist joint and slashing at his face and opening a shallow cut along his cheek. In retaliation he headbutted her, his forehead colliding with the bridge of her nose and breaking it. While she was momentarily dazed he sliced her throat open and she stumbled back against her desk while clawing at the thick red blood as it pumped from the yawning gash in her throat before she dropped to the ground, twitching occasionally.

He looked down at the dead body by his feet then at his hands, one flesh and blood and the other a dull, gleaming metal as they shook slightly. He'd forgotten how _good_ it felt to kill people, to take the life of another human being. To do it intentionally, to hunt them down like prey and kill them while they struggled ineffectively in his grip. Killing that civilian those years ago had been an accident and they provided no sport whatsoever in a hunt- killing soldiers and other people who _should_ know better always had its own unique thrill.

Glancing away from the woman's cooling corpse Liquid touched the sluggishly bleeding slice upon his face, thinking ruefully, _I'm so rusty._

It was true; being ten years out of conflict had clearly taken their toll for while he'd kept his body fit and healthy clearly his reflexes needed some work. Still, the woman had been faster than he'd anticipated and certainly a lot more inured to pain as dislocating her jaw hadn't bothered her at all.

Inhaling slowly Liquid struggled to calm down but it had been so long since he'd felt his blood run tallow hot from bloodlust and joy of the kill; it was like finally embracing an old friend, something that hadbeen a part of him right from the day he'd killed those Cipher guards and escaped back when he was a child. In that sense, it was an even closer companion to him than Mantis had been even if it was something they'd understood within one another.

To try and take his mind off that he quickly searched through the room, ignoring the slowly congealing puddle of blood as he began to rife through the paperwork spread out on the desk. Most of the information was about the the job the group had been assigned, which seemed more like just keeping the radio tower under control to prevent hostile forces intercepting their messages which Liquid had no interest in beyond knowing this was a Russian based PMC group sent out to keep an eye on things. Luckily he spoke and understood Russian as a second language so there were no issues with deciphering their orders.

He also made sure to patch up the cut on his cheek with the first aid kit he found, as he knew enough that even a shallow cut like that could easily become infected from all the dust and sand. Last thing he needed was half of his face rotting off so he saw to that before leaving to chase the scant leads.

Apparently Outer Heaven and the various PMC's it had were commissioned fairly often into the areas with persistent warfare, notably the Praying Mantis PMC which was most active in the Middle East but those were only small squads of a dozen who were caught in skirmishes with Middle Eastern militiamen. Tracking the scattered Praying Mantis units did give him more insight to the habits of the Outer Heaven units, but as far as he could tell they had simply been deployed to combat the local fighters in a continuous method of fighting- he made sure to sneak into their makeshift camps they made inside the many derelict and abandoned buildings through the various towns and cities to go through any information they'd gathered.

It was there he learned about the Sons of the Patriots system, or the System, which was deeply involved with all that nanomachine nonsense Liquid had heard about. According to the numerous reports he read, many were praising the usage of the nanomachines in aiding unit cohesion and response time, with members citing at how they could feel and see what their comrades experienced which helped coordinated rapid response to situations. It seemed like a bastardized version of his link with Mantis used to be like, and Liquid was unsure how he felt about it.

The System also apparently monitored the chemical balance within the soldiers, controlling their adrenaline and endorphins being releases, essentially keeping them in a prolonged battle highs alongside the elevated senses those chemicals induced. The nanomachines also helped with food poisoning and water filtering within the persons body, stopping the sickness such things would usually induce. Going through the reports of the many soldiers who'd eaten foreign food or even slightly rotten food without ill effects was interesting; due to Liquid's genetically enhanced hardiness he didn't suffer that often from food poison but he could see the advantage of having such things mainstreamed considering the fairly hectic environment of war. 

There was also the 'locked' weapons usage through the System, which was why Liquid was unable to use any discarded firearm he met. There was a fairly extensive list of which weapons were matched to each individual soldier, along with brief notes about how competent the soldier in question was with them. Then he had to leave as the commander came back to his makeshift office while Liquid was there and he broke the man's neck without too much fuss before leaving just as quietly as he'd arrived.

At least he knew being infested with nanomachines didn't make someones spinal cord more durable.

Due to never being implanted with them he had been fairly curious about their usage; finding out all state armies and all PMC's used them for their troops was unsettling for him and from one of the American units he'd snooped through he learned that they were slowly integrating them into law enforcement agencies and paramilitaries. While the nanomachines did seem to have numerous advantages, the idea of implanting something which controlled him to such a level was abhorrent and he couldn't understand how mainstream military were so stupid enough as to accept it. There was also the emotion suppression which baffled him- if people didn't have the natural fortitude to survive on the battlefield then they deserved to die. It was just how it was supposed to be, but now they were finding loopholes through it so the incompetent could still fight.

He wondered what would happen if the System was brought down. How those weak-minded individuals would cope in reality, not their machine-induced fantasy.

Thoughts for another time, though and Liquid spent nearly three days in that particular city, sneaking into camps and ransacking the commanders and head officers quarters for information. Most seemed to be more or less the same, with all PMC and deployed military being under thrall by nanomachines along with more information over the locked weapons. Liquid, after some initial irritation, was less bothered with the last one as he'd had the sense to take his dismantled guns with him and most of his situation was reconnaissance anyway. 

There was also more information about the economical global structure that had surrounded the sudden sharp, and acceptable, rise of PMCs. The 'war economy' as it was called which was focused on the artificial control towards the intensity of warfare which no doubt tied with the widespread usage of nanomachines which controlled how the soldiers themselves behaved. Liquid found the whole idea ridiculous, conflict for monetary sake while the troops fighting were stripped of passion. Of course, the people profiting from it the most weren't even the ones fighting. Typical.

However the stupidity of man wasn't what he was currently concerned with and he usually left the camps without any issue, barring one incident where he had to kill the sentries and three more commanders but their respective governments probably had no issues with deploying a replacement especially considering the profits they were raking in. He wanted to kill more, to hunt them down and taste their blood in his teeth as he tore them apart but he knew if he indulged those violent urges he'd suddenly have a lot more scrutiny placed upon him. So he forced that part of him down and continued the search.

The Middle Eastern landscape was beautiful at night however, and it provided a welcome respite from the heat and blood which aided him in controlling his newly reawakened bloodlust. When it was clear it was easily bright enough he had no issues finding his way, following the many tyre tracks that had torn up the ground. There was enough activity from foreign soldiers he kept low and out of sight as he skulked across the land and he had no problems from them.

A curious pack of jackals did follow him for nearly ten minutes at one point but after a while they seemingly deduced he wasn't dinner and left him alone. At this point he was fairly hungry but eating a jackal wasn't particularly appealing; he did wind up catching a mongoose, though. Otherwise he made do with stealing military rations which, while not exactly tasty, were filling. But he was surviving like he always did and slowly but surely the information began to stitch itself together.

Crossing pass another war-torn town he eventually found several soldiers who, from the looks of it, had been sent from an American-based private military company; to fight for which side Liquid wasn't sure but eavesdropping on them would bound to churn up some information, even if it was only bare bones. With that in mind he stealthily climbed up the ruined foundation of the deserted office building the group had sought refuge in until he was on the first floor and peering down through the broken ground; the damage looked as if it had been caused by mortar or rocket fire, leaving half of the building exposed to the elements and many of the walls being cracked and scorched.

The group of soldiers were on the ground floor and they were either too inexperienced, exhausted or confident to keep a tight check on a perimeter so he was able to settle down above them while lurking in the shadows of a massive wooden desk that was half smashed against the wall. The muted browns of his clothing also helped him blend in with the desaturated buildings and he silently shifted in place until all seven of the soldiers were in his field of vision.

Also in his current location he'd be able to drop down and kill one of the soldiers instantly and then gut the next two within the span of a few seconds, so there was also that advantage. But his current mission was recon and information gathering, not hunt and elimination. If he felt the need he _could_ torture information out of the soldiers but now he was content to be passive and simply observe them.

From the several three looked to be asleep or at least trying to rest on raggedy blankets spread out on the torn up carpet. For the four who were awake, one was eating from a dented can of beans while resting up against the wall, the second was applying a new bandage to a long, healing gash along his forearm and the third was pacing back and forth in the middle of the room. The only woman of the group was going through several caches of ammo and sorting out the various clips and bullets.

All of the seven were wearing army fatigues in various states of disarray and mud and dust coated the fabric. Their weapons were likewise battered and Liquid noted they were missing quite a few weapons that matched the ammo the woman was sorting out. Despite that there seemed to be no general air of fear around the seven even if Liquid guessed a portion of their number had been killed. Of course for mercenaries that was just a fact of life.

"Would you stop?" the woman suddenly snapped, her voice making the younger soldier jump and Liquid to shift his attention to her. The other two who were awake looked over at her before going back to their respective tasks.

"There's nothing to do!" the youth said, "I'm just...urgh, I don't know. I have to do _something_ rather than just stand here, waiting for whatever it is."

"You're being annoying is what you're doing, and throwing off my count," she said.

"We have enough ammo," he snapped back, "Since the rest of us got killed in that last rush-"

The soldier sitting against the wall snorted, "You ain't scared, the nano's saw to that. So settle down, Piers, and stop fussing."

"I still feel weird," the young man muttered.

The soldier who'd been refreshing his bandages had finally finished and started shrugging back on his camouflaged jacket as he spoke up, "It's fine, it takes a few weeks to settle- hell, my cousin took almost three months before she was used to them."

"Not about that! I mean yeah, I'm still getting used to them but you saw what happened back there,"

"What _had_ happened," the soldier at the wall said around a mouthful of beans.

The woman rolled her eyes, "People die in war, it's just what happens. We could die within the day, you already know that."

"Yeah, but this is different. It was like those people had been killed by rabid animals. They didn't say anything about fighting that crazy gang of dangerous ladies from Outer Heaven. They're all mad."

"You mean those FROGS?" the bean soldier grinned, lips stained with sauce, "They're a pain in the ass bouncing around like that but at least we aren't the ones they're gunning for. Also I'm not complaining about those skin-tight suits," he finished with a laugh in his voice even as the woman made an exaggerated gagging noise from where she was still sorting out ammo.

"Nah, he's thinking of the Beasts, aren't you wee grasshopper?" the soldier with the injured arm said.

"We haven't gone anywhere near where Outer Heaven is set up, and we're gonna be pulled out of this place soon," the woman interrupted, "'Side, think the company we're fighting for brought them in as well. I...think. Fuck if I know, all this PMC business gets convoluted after a while."

"But it's them, not the FROGS..." Piers looked fairly alarmed, hunching him on himself slightly, "I mean...you know, the _Beasts_."

"Oh _them_ and here I thought you were being serious," the soldier scrapped his fork in the bean tin even while rolling his eyes.

"I've heard about them, is all," Piers said nervously, "They all have creepy powers and stuff, like one mimics peoples faces and voices, another is like some weird feral wolf girl who runs around on all fours-"

"It's not powers," the woman said, looking up and scowling at her companions, "It's just that they're wearing such high-tech stuff compared with everyone else that's what it looks like. That Octopus woman just has optic camouflage beyond anything we currently have for our troops along with her being capable of mimicking voices, while Wolf uses a quadruped suit so she can traverse terrain far quicker than normal ground-based fighters. Those aren't superpowers and people like you spreading those stupid rumours around isn't helping anyone," she finished with a sharp snap of her teeth.

"No, but from what I hear they send the Beauty and Beast Unit in if things look unwinnable; no one has _ever_ survived against them."

"If no one survives then where the fuck are the stories coming from, then?" she scoffed.

"All the dead people we saw back there?" Piers shot back, "They were all torn to pieces, nearly three entire squads. We saw what had happened."

"Alright fine, so they're the elite of Outer Heaven, even beating out the FROGS. Having elites in units isn't a shockingly foreign concept," the woman said, "Even we have our black ops."

"Yeah but I've heard a lot of stuff about them- like when we were grouping up with that Canadian unit? How the Beasts are all screwed up in the head, completely insane by all accounts. They were like...victims or civilians or something until they snapped and then Outer Heaven caught them and messed them up so bad and stuffed them into those suits until they can't even live outside of them."

"They're supposed to be real hot under those suits though," the other man said, tapping his fork against his chin, "Total babes."

"You wouldn't catch me dead around one of them, I don't give a shit how attractive they're supposed to be," the one with the inured arm cut in, "Just hear them screaming and yelling when they go into fights- put anyone off. They killed a couple of my friends in that other city we passed by."

"What's their names again? Raging Raven, uh....Giggling Octopus and Wailing Wolf?"

"Those kind of names are so stupid," the woman said, "As if I'm so going to be terrified of someone named Raging Raven. Like try hard much."

"You wouldn't be saying that if you fought one of them. They're elites of the elites for a reason, especially with those high-tech suits of them. Must be a pain in the ass getting inside of them though."

"But that isn't right! I heard one of them can raise the dead and mind control people- it's that one with the six extra arms, who levitates everywhere; Screaming Mantis or whatever they call her," the young soldier said, "I heard about it from my brother who knew someone who fought her and she started like...zombifiying the people who'd died in the firefight and making people shoot their comrades and-"

"Ah yes, one of those really reliable 'my brothers friends cousins aunt saw it happen' stories," the female soldier really wasn't impressed with her companions fear-fueled gossip session.

"Oh leave him alone, Richie," the soldier with the wounded arm butted in, "Gossip is like half the part of being in the army. Like you haven't done it before."

"There's a difference between gossiping and entertaining useless rumours that do nothing more than frighten people," she insisted.

The soldiers conversation shifted from their brief touch upon the Beasts to complaining about their current state in the city. Liquid rolled his eyes after the first five minutes before carefully withdrawing. At least that wasn't _entirely_ useless, even if the soldiers had gotten Laughing Octopus and Crying Wolf's names wrong. Still, he knew a little bit more about the Beauty and Beast Unit, such as Wolf's armoured form and some of Octopus's abilities. As for the statement over Mantis's abilities to control the dead- that had never occurred while the man was alive but dying did seem to cause some unusual upsets within a person.

Or Liquid was just chasing ghosts and this woman had simply been named after the psychic who'd died a decade ago for nostalgia sake or a dramatic sense of irony.

As it was, the ghosts and rumours led him to a nearby city which was largely abandoned by all but the soldiers who had been locked in a stalemate fight for the last four months if reports were to be believed. The situation had gotten so bad one side decided to commission Outer Heaven's PMC's to tip the scale in their battles, a decision which was by all accounts paying off quite well.

The Beasts also reportedly didn't stray too far from one another, especially the leader Screaming Mantis. She, by all accounts, held the leashes to the other Beasts to prevent them from rampaging due to their unpredictability. So even if he just found one Beast she could lead him back to her leader when she returned to base after her mission and he could...he wasn't quite just _what_ he'd do, even moreso if Mantis was somehow complicit in the Beauty and Beast Unit. 

Another thing he'd sort out when it happened. He hadn't been this disorganized since he was child.

Regardless of his fairly ill-laid plans, Liquid snuck into the city and began to search through the winding streets and empty houses, many being damaged or littered with spent shells and half rotted remains of various fallen soldiers and militant men. The smell he'd long gotten used to back as a teenager and the rotted flesh didn't bother him. On his second day in the city he came across a small troop of soldiers scouting out what remained of a shopping district. Liquid shadowed them for nearly an hour, mentally sorting through all the information he had on the various PMC's in the area and deduced these ones weren't affiliated with Outer Heaven or the ones who'd commissioned Ocelot's troops which meant they were a target. As such he followed them until they stopped in an exposed market square and he watched as they began to rummage through the abandoned stalls and side shops.

Liquid squinted as he glanced up, something feeling strangely off about one of the birds circling high above the ruined city. Due to the sheer amount of fighting which led to excess corpses both sides couldn't waste time retrieving the bodies so the carrion littered the streets and drew massive flocks of the hungry birds which feasted on the discarded meat. The cawing of the birds echoed across the city like a discordant background music to the gunshots and screams of the injured and dying. But something about the small flock hanging far above in the dusty sky over the broken market place seemed odd and another noise danced at the edge of his hearing. Almost like the distant, muted sound of engines but from what Liquid had seen none of the troops fighting in the city hadn't brought in heavy ground vehicles yet due to the cramped conditions and there were no jets in the vicinity.

Still, his instincts were warning him of danger lurking above almost as soon as he'd approached the market square and Liquid wasn't fool enough to ignore them. So he kept close to the sides of the buildings, slinking underneath broken verandas as he crept through the narrow walkways of the city. The only ones left were mainly the soldiers locked in constant battle and the rare few stubborn civilians who hadn't yet been killed.

Then a scream like a sea eagle ripped through the air as a heavily armoured shape plummeted down, speeding down so quickly they were no more than a dark green blur shooting vertically towards the ground. The troops in the market place shouted out in alarm as the falling object closed the distance between them with astonishing speed but before they could do anything the shape shot up just seconds before turning into a bloody crater on the ground and, with a screech of engines, hurtled between a group of the soldiers and completely bisecting them in half with sharp wings before spiraling back up into the air.

Liquid watched attentively as the bird-like form twisted around, flexible metal flapping up and down as they pivoted in place with the thrusters at their back providing the stability. The wings, the avian shape, the MGL-140 grenade launcher hanging at their side- It was Raging Raven.

After weeks of searching he had _finally_ found one of the illusive Beasts.

His internal surge of triumph was interrupted when the soldiers who'd been missed by Raging Raven's initial attack began to shoot her, bullets ricocheting off her armour. With a screech Raven shot up several yards in the air before firing her grenade launcher and killing two of the troops below in an explosion of dirt and gore and throwing three others back due to the blast. Pivoting in midair Raven rotated and shot down in a sweeping loop as she circled around the wide market square, almost pointed at a perpendicular angle as she flew in continuous tight curves with the tip of a wing only inches from the ground.

As she flew around the remaining soldiers the dust from the cracked and broken earth spiraled up in a whirlwind, blinding the people trapped within her self-made vortex. 

Liquid squinted as the dust and dirt grew thicker, thankful for the goggles he'd stole from the corpse earlier that prevented him from being blinded. Even hidden up in the wreckage of what had once been a house he kept low to the ground and his movements still; he had little doubt that if Raging Raven did catch sight of him she'd instantly turn hostile.

With an abrupt movement Raven suddenly swerved upright, hovering over the swirl dust and disorientated soldiers. Then she launched two of the missiles attached to the upper undersides of her spread wings, the resulting explosion shaking the foundation of the nearby buildings and killing all the soldiers trapped below in a fiery explosion when sent limbs and gore flying in all directions.

The dust storm dissipated with a low sigh as Raven hovered over the torn earth like an armoured angel, wings stretched out and flapping gracefully as she slowly floated back until she landed on one of the buildings ringing the market square where she perched like a heavily armoured vulture. Liquid's eyes narrowed as he studied the woman, mentally going through all the information he'd gathered on the bird based member of the Beauty and Beast Unit; she was their aerial support and demolitions expert, well known for the fits of rage she'd hurl herself into and the frenzied violence she'd indulge in while in battle. She was usually accompanied by Sliders, the aerial drones deployed by the PMC's Praying Mantis and Raven Sword. Now however she was alone but obviously didn't currently require outside aid.

But _why_ she was here was a different story but from the stories that surrounded the Beasts Liquid would wager she'd simply decided to go 'hunting' on her own. The Beasts seemed to be as likely to attack the soldiers of the PMCs on their own side as they were to attack their enemies. 'Rabid dogs', they'd been described as once, attacking everyone around them if they caught the fancy.

Liquid scoffed at the notion- they were behaving as someone within war should behave. Striking at any sign of weakness, of hunting down those who could become harmful towards yourself, those were not the marks of feral beasts with no directions; It was the mindset of survivors, of what he and Mantis had done so long ago when they were purging those facilities that kept the psychic captive as a child, when he was hunting down remnants of Big Boss's scattered armies. It did not make them _rabid._

Typical that such inane rubbish came from the useless, nanomachine-high 'soldiers' who could hardly hit the broad side of a barn from what he'd witnessed so far. As if they knew anything about such a thing and to pass along such judgement was near insulting.

But still it wasn't Raging Raven he was after- rather it was the one who held her leash, Screaming Mantis aka the Beast of Beasts. However since she was one of the four, Raven could potentially led him to where Mantis was. Or whatever that creature was that held his long-dead companions name.

Then Raven twisted violently, a sharp hiss emanating from her as she pivoted in place upon the city roof which snapped Liquid's attention away from his internal brooding and instantly he saw what had snagged Raven's attention; one foolish person had apparently forsaken the relative safety of the winding city walls and had inched out into the open area of the market square. Liquid took one look at the man's patched clothes and the various dismantled weapons and knickknacks hanging from his back and knew this was a scavenger, coming to pick at the left overs of the scene of the carnage. Unfortunately he had made a very big mistake; he hadn't made sure the apex predator who'd caused the death in the first place had left the area.

Raging Raven was instantly on the man in a swirl of dust and a beat of her wings, landing onto his back like a giant bird of prey as her peg-like legs slammed him onto the ground with a harsh noise.

With a scream of rage Raven simply began to beat the man to death with her bare hands, the heavy armour of her fists easily smashing the bones in the man's head as she pummeled him into the dirt while screeching incoherently, her grenade launcher discarded on the ground next to her. Even when she had smashed his skull open and his corpse lay twitching pinned below she continued to beat at him, her fist eventually striking the ground underneath the gooey, bloody mass where the man's head had been.

She continued to punch uselessly at the red-stained dirt for a minute after before her movements slowed. Behind her, the long wings twitched and fluttered with agitation while her breath came in thick heaves which was distorted by the helmet she was wearing, making her sound as if two people were wheezing in unison.

Then Raven stiffed slightly and Liquid tensed as a strange, near inaudible high note began to ring through the air. As it did a sharp spike of pain shot through Liquid's head and his vision doubled violently. Below Raven screamed and twisted around, blood dripping off her fists and wings flaring as she pivoted around and looked directly at him, both of them freezing in place. The pounding in his skull grew painful enough he thought his head was about to split open and the shrill note hanging in the air got to an even higher pitch he grimaced in pain and Raven snarled as she twisted around and snatched up her grenade launcher, blood dripping from her hands.

With a roar Raging Raven's thrusters came to life, spewing out engine fire as she righted up and hopped into the air. Flapping her long wings Raven ascended quickly into the pale sky, sending gales of wind swirling in every direction. Then she twisted around and took off and quick as a cat Liquid scaled up the side of the building, slipping up the broken wall and climbing up onto the roof. He immediately spotted Raven's airborne form as she flew off, angling towards the north west.

That way was his best bet. With that in mind, he set off after her.


End file.
